Wug

//wʌɡ// noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    An imaginary creature resembling a bird, used in the Wug Test to investigate the acquisition of the plural form in English-speaking children.
  2. 2
    In folk taxonomy, a creature with worm or insect features; colloquially, a bug or creepy-crawly.

Example

More examples

"This is a wug. These are two wugs."

Etymology

Etymology 1

Pseudoword, coined ex nihilo by American psycholinguist Jean Berko Gleason in the 1950s as a word that children taking the test would not have heard before.

Etymology 2

Blend of worm + bug.

Related phrases

Wug Testwug word

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