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pseudoword

pseudoword noun: a unit of speech or text that respects the phonotactic restrictions of a language, but is not part of the lexicon; a non-word whose nonexistence is merely an accidental gap.

Noun

pseudoword (plural pseudowords)

  1. A unit of speech or text that respects the phonotactic restrictions of a language, but is not part of the lexicon; a non-word whose nonexistence is merely an accidental gap.
    • In Experiment 1, pseudowords made up of Italian derivational suffixes of various frequencies and meaningless pseudoroots were contrasted to pseudowords in which the same pseudoroots were combined with control orthographically legal final sequences.2011, R. Harald Baayen, Robert Schreuder, Morphological Structure in Language Processing, page 186
    Synonyms:
    wug word

pseudoword meaning in Indonesian and Thai

pseudoword in Indonesian

unit
kata semu

pseudoword in Thai

unit
ศัพท์เทียม sàp tiam

Synonyms of pseudoword

Forms of pseudoword

pluralpseudowords

Origin of pseudoword

From pseudo- + word.

Questions about pseudoword

What does pseudoword mean?
Pseudoword means a unit of speech or text that respects the phonotactic restrictions of a language, but is not part of the lexicon; a non-word whose nonexistence is merely an accidental gap.
What is pseudoword in Indonesian?
Pseudoword in Indonesian is kata semu. See Pseudoword meaning in Indonesian.
What part of speech is pseudoword?
Pseudoword is a noun.
What is the plural of pseudoword?
The plural of pseudoword is pseudowords.

Words near pseudoword in the dictionary

  1. pseudowhorl
  2. pseudowhorls
  3. pseudowire
  4. pseudowires
  5. pseudowollastonite
  6. pseudoword
  7. pseudowords
  8. pseudowork
  9. pseudoxanthoma
  10. pseudoxanthoma elasticum
  11. pseudoxanthomas

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pseudoword (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-pseudoword.wav.

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