Word.ws English Dictionary

non-words

non-words is the plural of non-word.

Meaning of non-word

Noun

non-word (plural non-words)

  1. Any sequence of sounds or letters which is not considered to be a word, whether through an accidental gap (for example, phextapher-styphren) or through a systematic gap (for example, fssstpklyitnbkdv).
    • This linguistics textbook, like many others, precedes nonwords with an asterisk; for example, *narbletome.
    Antonyms:
    word
  2. (informal) Any term that is not among the words of a language as those have often traditionally been defined by nonlinguists (for example, having syllables, and having come from centuries-old predecessor words): thus, an abbreviation, acronym, initialism, alphanumeric symbol, number written in digits (Arabic numerals 0 to 9), or logographic symbol.
    • In their glossary, they were using a convention where the words were in blue font and the abbreviations and other nonwords were in purple font.
    Antonyms:
    word

Questions about non-words

What is non-words the plural of?
Non-words is the plural of non-word.

Words near non-words in the dictionary

  1. non-withdrawable
  2. non-Witness
  3. non-Witnesses
  4. non-woody
  5. non-word
  6. non-words
  7. non-work
  8. non-workable
  9. non-works
  10. non-woven
  11. non-zero

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: non-words (page history and authors); non-word (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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Cite this entry: “non-words.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/non-words. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.