Word list · 16 words
Words about words
Language has a vocabulary for its own accidents: the misheard lyric, the mixed-up word that accidentally makes sense, the sounds that swap places in a slip of the tongue, the word that goes blank when you say it too often. This list collects them.
Some are linguists' terms with a long history and some are recent coinages that caught on. Eggcorn, for one, dates only from 2003, when the linguist Geoffrey Pullum suggested it in a discussion on the Language Log blog. Each entry says where its term comes from.
Kept on this device only, for the daily recall in My words.
The words
Eggcorn
An eggcorn is a misheard word or phrase swapped for a similar-sounding one that happens to make its own sense — like 'egg corn' for 'acorn', or 'for all intensive purposes'.
Literary & Rhetorical
Mondegreen
A misheard lyric or phrase that produces a new, often better one — and a word coined from exactly such a mishearing.
Literary & Rhetorical
Malapropism
Using the wrong word in place of a similar-sounding one, with comic effect — a pineapple of politeness, dance a flamingo.
Literary & Rhetorical
Spoonerism
A spoonerism is a slip where the opening sounds of two words trade places — 'shoving leopard' for 'loving shepherd'.
Literary & Rhetorical
Semantic Satiation
Semantic satiation is the temporary draining of meaning from a word when you repeat or stare at it enough times, until it becomes a bare sound or shape.
Cognitive Biases & the Mind
Lethologica
Lethologica is the state of not being able to summon a word you know you know — and it has almost no lexicographic standing at all.
Rare & Beautiful English
Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon
The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon is being certain you know a word, a name or a fact and feeling its arrival is imminent, while the thing itself refuses to come.
Cognitive Biases & the Mind
Presque Vu
Presque vu is the feeling of standing right at the edge of a realisation — a name, a word, an insight — that never quite arrives.
Cognitive Biases & the Mind
Hapax Legomenon
A word that appears only once in a whole body of text — and therefore has no second instance to check its meaning against.
Literary & Rhetorical
Neologism
A newly coined word or phrase, or an existing word given a new meaning — and the process that keeps a language from being a museum.
Literary & Rhetorical
Portmanteau
A word made by fusing two others so their meanings pack together — brunch, smog, motel, podcast.
Literary & Rhetorical
Lingua franca
A language people use to talk to each other when neither speaks the other's first language.
Literary & Rhetorical
Pidgin
A simplified language that grows up between groups with no common tongue, usually for trade.
Literary & Rhetorical
Sesquipedalian
Given to using very long words — or, of a word, absurdly long.
Rare & Beautiful English