Contextualizebeta

nonsense word

noun

Etymology

From nonsense + word.

  1. inherited from *werdʰh₁om✻ — “word”
  2. inherited from *wurdą✻ — “word”
  3. inherited from *word✻
  4. inherited from word
  5. inherited from word
  6. compounded as nonsense word — “nonsense + word”

Definitions

  1. A neologised word that does not have a given meaning, or that has been invented without…

    A neologised word that does not have a given meaning, or that has been invented without any etymological sense.

    • George Bernard Shaw's classic joke about English spelling is that his nonsense word ghoti should be pronounced fish. He explained: gh = like the gh in cough = fo = like the o in women = i ti = like the ti in nation = sh ghoti = fish.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for nonsense word. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA