Word.ws English Dictionary

spow

/spaʊ/

spow verb: an imaginary action resembling the headcarrying of a teapot, used in the Wug Test to investigate the acquisition of the past participle form in English-speaking children.

Verb

spow (third-person singular simple present spows, present participle spowing, simple past and past participle spowed)

  1. An imaginary action resembling the headcarrying of a teapot, used in the Wug Test to investigate the acquisition of the past participle form in English-speaking children.
    • this is a man who knows how to spow

Forms of spow

third-person singular presentspows
present participlespowing
past participlespowed
pastspowed

Origin of spow

Pseudoword, coined ex nihilo by American psycholinguist Jean Berko Gleason in the 1950s as a word that children taking the test would not have heard before. Probably influenced by spout

Words that rhyme with spow

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about spow

What does spow mean?
Spow means an imaginary action resembling the headcarrying of a teapot, used in the Wug Test to investigate the acquisition of the past participle form in English-speaking children.
What part of speech is spow?
Spow is a verb.
How do you pronounce spow?
Spow is pronounced /spaʊ/.
What is the past tense of spow?
The past tense of spow is spowed.

Words near spow in the dictionary

  1. spoutlike
  2. spouts
  3. spouts off
  4. spouts out
  5. spouty
  6. spow
  7. Spowage
  8. Spowages
  9. spox
  10. spoxes
  11. spoyle

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: spow (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: “spow.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/spow. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.