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An erosion gully in Australia caused by rabbits, an unintended consequence of their introduction as game animals. In the social sciences, unintended consequences (sometimes unanticipated consequences or unforeseen consequences, more colloquially called knock-on effects) are outcomes of a purposeful action that are not intended or foreseen.
Synonym list in cuneiform on a clay tablet, Neo-Assyrian period [1] A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means precisely or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. [2] For example, in the English language, the words begin, start, commence, and initiate are all synonyms of one another: they are ...
A false accusation of rape is the intentional reporting of a rape where no rape has occurred. It is difficult to assess the prevalence of false accusations because they are often conflated with non-prosecuted cases under the designation "unfounded".
A pseudoword is a unit of speech or text that appears to be an actual word in a certain language, while in fact it has no meaning.It is a specific type of nonce word, or even more narrowly a nonsense word, composed of a combination of phonemes which nevertheless conform to the language's phonotactic rules. [1]
An unpaired word is one that, according to the usual rules of the language, would appear to have a related word but does not. [1] Such words usually have a prefix or suffix that would imply that there is an antonym , with the prefix or suffix being absent or opposite.
Semantic change (also semantic shift, semantic progression, semantic development, or semantic drift) is a form of language change regarding the evolution of word usage—usually to the point that the modern meaning is radically different from the original usage.
A aggravate – Some have argued that this word should not be used in the sense of "to annoy" or "to oppress", but only to mean "to make worse". According to AHDI, the use of "aggravate" as "annoy" occurs in English as far back as the 17th century. In Latin, from which the word was borrowed, both meanings were used. Sixty-eight percent of AHD4's usage panel approves of its use in "It's the ...
pseudoword: a nonsense word that still follows the phonotactics of a particular language and is therefore pronounceable, feeling to native speakers like a possible word (for example, in English, blurk is a pseudoword, but bldzkg is a nonword); thus, pseudowords follow a language's phonetic rules but have no meaning [10]