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The word "malapropism" (and its earlier form, "malaprop") comes from a character named "Mrs. Malaprop" in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's 1775 play The Rivals. [2] Mrs. Malaprop frequently misspeaks (to comic effect) by using words which do not have the meaning that she intends but which sound similar to words that do.
Techniques that involve semantics and the choosing of words. Anglish: a writing using exclusively words of Germanic origin; Auto-antonym: a word that contains opposite meanings; Autogram: a sentence that provide an inventory of its own characters; Irony; Malapropism: incorrect usage of a word by substituting a similar-sounding word with ...
A mondegreen (/ ˈ m ɒ n d ɪ ˌ ɡ r iː n / ⓘ) is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning. [1] Mondegreens are most often created by a person listening to a poem or a song; the listener, being unable to hear a lyric clearly, substitutes words that sound similar and make some kind of sense.
Phono-semantic matching (PSM) is the incorporation of a word into one language from another, often creating a neologism, where the word's non-native quality is hidden by replacing it with phonetically and semantically similar words or roots from the adopting language.
This is an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 14 January 2025. This is a list of onomatopoeias, i.e. words that imitate, resemble, or suggest the source of the sound that they describe. For more information, see the linked articles. Human vocal sounds Achoo, Atishoo, the sound of a sneeze Ahem, a sound made to clear the throat or to draw attention ...
It may originate from the word jib, which is the Angloromani variant of the Romani language word meaning "language" or "tongue". To non-speakers, the Anglo-Romany dialect could sound like English mixed with nonsense words, and if those seemingly nonsensical words are referred to as jib then the term gibberish could be derived as a descriptor ...
Google Dictionary is an online dictionary service of Google that can be accessed with the "define" operator and other similar phrases [note 1] in Google Search. [2] It is also available in Google Translate and as a Google Chrome extension. The dictionary content is licensed from Oxford University Press's Oxford Languages. [3]
An idiom is a common word or phrase with a figurative, non-literal meaning that is understood culturally and differs from what its composite words' denotations would suggest; i.e. the words together have a meaning that is different from the dictionary definitions of the individual words (although some idioms do retain their literal meanings – see the example "kick the bucket" below).