Word.ws English Dictionary

wug

UK/wʌɡ/

More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations

Northern England/wʊɡ/

wug noun: an imaginary creature resembling a bird, used in the Wug Test to investigate the acquisition of the plural form in English-speaking children.

wug: an imaginary creature resembling a bird, used in the Wug Test to investigate the acquisition of the...
Image: Jean Berko Gleason, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun (1)

wug (plural wugs (see usage notes))

  1. An imaginary creature resembling a bird, used in the Wug Test to investigate the acquisition of the plural form in English-speaking children.

Noun (2)

wug (plural wugs)

  1. In folk taxonomy, a creature with worm or insect features; colloquially, a bug or creepy-crawly.

Forms of wug

pluralwugs

Origin of wug

] 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.

From worm + bug.

Words formed from wug

Phrases with wug

Words that rhyme with wug

23 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about wug

What does wug mean?
Wug means an imaginary creature resembling a bird, used in the Wug Test to investigate the acquisition of the plural form in English-speaking children.
What part of speech is wug?
Wug is a noun.
How do you pronounce wug?
Wug is pronounced /wʌɡ/ (UK).
What is the plural of wug?
The plural of wug is wugs.

Words near wug in the dictionary

  1. wuffo
  2. wuffos
  3. wuffs
  4. WuFlu
  5. Wufong
  6. wug
  7. wug word
  8. wug words
  9. Wugang
  10. Wuggers
  11. Wuggins

Source and license

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