non-word
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.97 in modern English
11
Scrabble Score
7
Letters
3
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
Any sequence of sounds or letters which is not considered to be a word, whether through an accidental gap (for example, phextapher-styphren) or through a systematic gap (for example, fssstpklyitnbkdv).
noun
Any term that is not among the words of a language as those have often traditionally been defined by nonlinguists (for example, having syllables, and having come from centuries-old predecessor words): thus, an abbreviation, acronym, initialism, alphanumeric symbol, number written in digits (Arabic numerals 0 to 9), or logographic symbol.
Informal
Example Sentences
- "This linguistics textbook, like many others, precedes nonwords with an asterisk; for example, *narbletome."
- "[…] trashola prose features regular dollops of sub-literate laziness (including non-words like "arousement" and "assertation")."
- "In their glossary, they were using a convention where the words were in blue font and the abbreviations and other nonwords were in purple font."
- "All this was revealing and encouraged our work to proceed with a less lofty aim than initially, but with a more practical one, namely, to inform authors, reviewers, and especially desk or copyeditors about the recommendations in different areas of biology and to imbue these persons with the need for some rules and guidelines on the use of "nonwords" in science. Clearly, authors and editors are free to use symbols and abbreviations of their choice as long as they are defined and conform to basic rules of scientific nomenclature in their fields."
Etymology
From non- + word.