Phonotactic

adj

adj ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Pertaining to phonotactics. not-comparable

    "So, we all have intuitions about possible and impossible stress patterns in sentences. Moreover, we all have strong phonotactic intuitions – i.e. intuitions about what are possible and impossible sound sequences among native words in English. For instance, we'd probably all agree that blick is a possible, but non-occurring English word, whereas *bnick by contrast is not a possible native English word[.]"

  2. 2
    Pertaining to phonotaxis. not-comparable

Synonyms

All synonyms
phonotactical

Example

More examples

"So, we all have intuitions about possible and impossible stress patterns in sentences. Moreover, we all have strong phonotactic intuitions – i.e. intuitions about what are possible and impossible sound sequences among native words in English. For instance, we'd probably all agree that blick is a possible, but non-occurring English word, whereas *bnick by contrast is not a possible native English word[.]"

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.