pseudo-English
pseudo-English noun: lexical borrowings from English that do not correspond directly to English word usage.
Noun
pseudo-English (uncountable)
- Lexical borrowings from English that do not correspond directly to English word usage.
- Then and now Back in 1981 when I wrote the first article on this subject (The Incorporated Linguist 20, 104, 1981), Naples was in the throes of a boom in the use of English (or rather pseudo-English) in local facias and tradenames.1985, The Incorporated Linguist: The Journal of the Institute of Linguists
- A structured artificial language that uses English words in order to be more user friendly for English speakers.
- There is a strong feeling that pseudo-English is more "user friendly" than symbolic notation.1983, Laurie A. Russell, David M. Weintraub, APL 83, Conference proceedings, Washington, D.C., April 10-13, 1983
- The possibility of verbal encoding of mathematical formulas into pseudo-English has deliberately been built into COBOL; for example, "compute velocity times time giving distance" is nothing but syntactic sugar for "distance := velocity · time".2014, Jenny Cheshire, Dieter Stein, Taming the Vernacular: From Dialect to Written Standard Language, →ISBN
- Nonsense text or speech that resembles English in some way.
- However, even then, pseudo-English is a useful intermediate output since it can be used to update the dictionaries, to refine the partitioning methods, and to derive rules for syntactic analysis.1959, Proceedings of the Eastern Joint Computer Conference - Volume 16, page 152
- Pseudo-English has been reported to me by several mothers of three-year-olds. One Bengali-speaking mother provided me with an audio recording of her daughter using it while talking on a toy telephone to an imaginary English-speaking friend, and I videotaped a Japanese boy using this medium with...1988, Deborah Tannen, Linguistics in Context: Connecting Observation and Understanding
- English-language jargon or dialect that does not reflect the way most people speak.
- But he could not write or speak English in a manner tolerable to any Englishman; and although he knew nearly all the words in the language, it was dictionary knowledge, and so different from an Englishman's apprehension of the same words that it was only a sort of pseudo-English that he knew, and...1879, Michael Montgomery Fisher quoting someone else, The Three Pronunciations of Latin, page 79
- What fevers Barzun, of course, is the artificial pseudo-English that schoolma'ams, whether in panties or in pantaloons, try to foist upon their victims, and the even worse jargon that Dogberrys in and out of office use for their revelations to the multitude.1971, Elizabeth Margaret Kerr, Ralph M. Aderman, Aspects of American English, →ISBN, page 75
Adjective
pseudo-English (comparative more pseudo-English, superlative most pseudo-English)
- In a style or manner that imitates the way things are done in England.
- During his adolescence he went to the most exclusive of the pseudo-English schools that try to recreate a Harrow or an Eton on the alien American scene.1947, The New English Review - Volume 15, page 302
- "The phone would ring. "Is this the Jesus Yoder or the Merton Yoder?" a pseudo-English voice would inquire.2004, Edwin M Yoder, Jr., Telling Others What to Think: Recollections of a Pundit, →ISBN, page 191
- Imitating the English language.
- The other two are done very badly — so badly as to be in parts unintelligible, unless the reader has the skill to hammer out conjecturally the German or Italian original from the pseudo-English gibberish which is set before him.1892, The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art
- Occasionally the French mania for showing off the talent they do not possess leads to still more amusing linguistic comedies — for instance, that case of the pseudo-English verb, flirter.1914, Rollin Lynde Hartt, Understanding the French, page 132
Examples of pseudo-English in a sentence
- Pseudo-English has been reported to me by several mothers of three-year-olds.1988, Deborah Tannen, Linguistics in Context: Connecting Observation and Understanding:
- In Pseudo-English (i.e. a non-existent English or language), questions are formed by means of mirror inversion of the word order in corresponding declarative sentences.2005, Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs, Babel: revue international de la traduction:
- One of the problems in writing about the new pseudo-English lies in finding the right nomenclature.1978, A. M. Tibbetts, Charlene Tibbetts, What's happening to American English?, page 7:
- In 1928, on the verge of moving into his pseudo-English mansion on Long Island's North Shore, Cantor was in a state of reflective happiness.2006, Judith S. Goldstein, Inventing Great Neck: Jewish Identity and the American Dream, →ISBN:
Forms of pseudo-English
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| alternative form | pseudo English |
| Adjective | |
| comparative | more pseudo-English |
| superlative | most pseudo-English |
Origin of pseudo-English
From pseudo- + English.
Questions about pseudo-English
- What does pseudo-English mean?
- Pseudo-English means lexical borrowings from English that do not correspond directly to English word usage.
- How do you use pseudo-English in a sentence?
- Pseudo-English has been reported to me by several mothers of three-year-olds.
- What part of speech is pseudo-English?
- Pseudo-English can be a noun or an adjective.
Words near pseudo-English in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: pseudo-English (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.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-pseudo-English.wav.
Cite this entry: “pseudo-English.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pseudo-english. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.