Word.ws English Dictionary

nonsense words

nonsense words is the plural of nonsense word.

Meaning of nonsense word

Noun

nonsense word (plural nonsense words)

  1. A neologised word that does not have a given meaning, or that has been invented without any etymological sense.
    • George Bernard Shaw's classic joke about English spelling is that his nonsense word ghoti should be pronounced fish. He explained: gh = like the gh in cough = fo = like the o in women = i ti = like the ti in nation = sh ghoti = fish.1983, Michael E. Adelstein, Wendell Keats Sparrow, Business communications

Questions about nonsense words

What is nonsense words the plural of?
Nonsense words is the plural of nonsense word.

Words near nonsense words in the dictionary

  1. nonsense
  2. nonsense mutation
  3. nonsense mutations
  4. nonsense syndrome
  5. nonsense word
  6. nonsense words
  7. nonsense-mediated decay
  8. nonsensed
  9. nonsensely
  10. nonsenses
  11. nonsensibility

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nonsense words (page history and authors); nonsense 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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