pseudoword

From pseudo- +‎ word.

• Audio (US):

  (file)

 

English Wikipedia has an article on:

pseudoword

Wikipedia

pseudoword (plural pseudowords)

1. (linguistics) 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.

   Synonym: wug word

   • 2011, R. Harald Baayen, Robert Schreuder, Morphological Structure in Language Processing, page 186:

     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.

• nonword, non-word

• nonce word, nonsense word, pseudoletter