Pseudo-english
adj, noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Lexical borrowings from English that do not correspond directly to English word usage. uncountable
"Then and now Back in 1981 when I wrote the first article on this subject (The Incorporated Linguist 20, 104, 1981), Naples was in the throes of a boom in the use of English (or rather pseudo-English) in local facias and tradenames."
- 2 A structured artificial language that uses English words in order to be more user friendly for English speakers. uncountable
"There is a strong feeling that pseudo-English is more "user friendly" than symbolic notation."
- 3 Nonsense text or speech that resembles English in some way. uncountable
"However, even then, pseudo-English is a useful intermediate output since it can be used to update the dictionaries, to refine the partitioning methods, and to derive rules for syntactic analysis."
- 4 English-language jargon or dialect that does not reflect the way most people speak. derogatory, uncountable
"But he could not write or speak English in a manner tolerable to any Englishman; and although he knew nearly all the words in the language, it was dictionary knowledge, and so different from an Englishman's apprehension of the same words that it was only a sort of pseudo-English that he knew, and not our living tongue."
- 1 In a style or manner that imitates the way things are done in England.
"During his adolescence he went to the most exclusive of the pseudo-English schools that try to recreate a Harrow or an Eton on the alien American scene."
- 2 Imitating the English language.
"The other two are done very badly — so badly as to be in parts unintelligible, unless the reader has the skill to hammer out conjecturally the German or Italian original from the pseudo-English gibberish which is set before him."
Example
More examples"Then and now Back in 1981 when I wrote the first article on this subject (The Incorporated Linguist 20, 104, 1981), Naples was in the throes of a boom in the use of English (or rather pseudo-English) in local facias and tradenames."
Etymology
From pseudo- + English.
More for "pseudo-english"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.