English Explanatory Dictionary

spow

English dictionary entry

Meanings

verb
  1. An imaginary action resembling the headcarrying of a teapot, used in the Wug Test to investigate the acquisition of the past participle form in English-speaking children.

Pronunciation

spou /spaʊ/

Word forms

spow spows spowing spowed

Etymology

Pseudoword, coined ex nihilo by American psycholinguist Jean Berko Gleason in the 1950s as a word that children taking the test would not have heard before. Probably influenced by spout

This entry uses open data from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA/GFDL). Word forms are used for search and are not indexed as separate pages.
Back to search All on S Russian dictionary Dahl dictionary