Protoword

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    An early wordlike utterance produced by an infant before it has acquired a true language.
  2. 2
    A wordlike utterance produced by early people who had yet to develop full language capability; a word from a proto-language.

Etymology

From proto- + word.

Related phrases

proto language

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