What does "pseudoword" mean?

A unit of speech or text that respects the phonotactic restrictions of a language, but is not part of the lexicon; a non-word whose nonexistence is merely an accidental gap.

What is a synonym for "pseudoword"?

Common synonyms include: nonce word, wug word, wug word.

Pseudoword

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun

1
A unit of speech or text that respects the phonotactic restrictions of a language, but is not part of the lexicon; a non-word whose nonexistence is merely an accidental gap.
"In Experiment 1, pseudowords made up of Italian derivational suffixes of various frequencies and meaningless pseudoroots were contrasted to pseudowords in which the same pseudoroots were combined with control orthographically legal final sequences."

Synonyms

All synonyms

nonce word wug word wug word

Example

More examples

"In Experiment 1, pseudowords made up of Italian derivational suffixes of various frequencies and meaningless pseudoroots were contrasted to pseudowords in which the same pseudoroots were combined with control orthographically legal final sequences."

Etymology

From pseudo- + word.

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