Word.ws English Dictionary

pseudo-linguistics

pseudo-linguistics noun: work purporting to fall under the scholarly field of linguistics but falling short of its standards; linguistic pseudo-scholarship.

Noun

pseudo-linguistics (uncountable)

  1. Work purporting to fall under the scholarly field of linguistics but falling short of its standards; linguistic pseudo-scholarship.
    • Roy Medvedev deals with the less known but even odder pseudo-linguistics of Nikolai Marr.Los Angeles Times (Nexis) 2 May 2004, R7

Forms of pseudo-linguistics

alternative formpseudolinguistics

Origin of pseudo-linguistics

From pseudo- + linguistics. First attested 1962 (OED). Modelled on the earlier adjective pseudolinguistic (as in "pseudolinguistic science", attested 1915).

Questions about pseudo-linguistics

What does pseudo-linguistics mean?
Pseudo-linguistics means work purporting to fall under the scholarly field of linguistics but falling short of its standards; linguistic pseudo-scholarship.
What part of speech is pseudo-linguistics?
Pseudo-linguistics is a noun.

Words near pseudo-linguistics in the dictionary

  1. pseudo-lesbian
  2. pseudo-lesbians
  3. pseudo-liberation
  4. pseudo-liberations
  5. pseudo-life
  6. pseudo-linguistics
  7. pseudo-lives
  8. pseudo-loan
  9. pseudo-loans
  10. pseudo-localization
  11. pseudo-logician

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pseudo-linguistics (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-linguistics.wav.

Cite this entry: “pseudo-linguistics.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pseudo-linguistics. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.