pseudoword
nounEtymology From pseudo- + word.
1
Human sciences, Linguistics, Sciences 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:
- Related terms
- nonce word, nonsense word, pseudoletter
- Hypernyms
- nonword, non-word