Word.ws English Dictionary

Escher sentence

Escher sentence noun: a sentence which initially seems acceptable (grammatical and parseable), but upon inspection is nonsensical.

Noun

Escher sentence (plural Escher sentences)

  1. A sentence which initially seems acceptable (grammatical and parseable), but upon inspection is nonsensical.
    • Escher sentences are extremely rare. One or two examples have circulated in the linguistics blogs, with minor lexical mutations, but no one has come up with an example culled from text or even from spontaneous spoken conversation. […] Unlike Escher sentences, most expressions do not cause such a...2012, James R. Hurford, The Origins of Grammar: Language in the Light of Evolution II, page 215
    • […2020, Viviane Déprez, M. Teresa Espinal, The Oxford Handbook of Negation

Forms of Escher sentence

pluralEscher sentences

Questions about Escher sentence

What does Escher sentence mean?
Escher sentence means a sentence which initially seems acceptable (grammatical and parseable), but upon inspection is nonsensical.
What part of speech is Escher sentence?
Escher sentence is a noun.
What is the plural of Escher sentence?
The plural of Escher sentence is Escher sentences.

Words near Escher sentence in the dictionary

  1. Eschel blue
  2. eschels
  3. Eschenmoser fragmentation
  4. Eschenmoser fragmentations
  5. Escher
  6. Escher sentence
  7. Escher sentences
  8. Escheresque
  9. Escherian
  10. escherichioses
  11. escherichiosis

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Escher sentence (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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