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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

wug.

An imaginary creature resembling a bird, used in the Wug Test to investigate the acquisition of the plural form in English-speaking children.

3 characters1 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/wʌɡ/Received-Pronunciation, Southern-England/wʊɡ/Northern-England/wʌɡ/General-American/wɐɡ/Australia, New-Zealand
  1. An imaginary creature resembling a bird, used in the Wug Test to investigate the acquisition of the plural form in English-speaking children.

Where this word comes from

] 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.

noun/wʌɡ/Received-Pronunciation, Southern-England/wʊɡ/Northern-England/wʌɡ/General-American/wɐɡ/Australia, New-Zealand
  1. In folk taxonomy, a creature with worm or insect features; colloquially, a bug or creepy-crawly.

Where this word comes from

Etymology tree Proto-Germanic *wurmiz Proto-West Germanic *wurmi Old English wyrm Middle English worm English worm English bug English wug From worm + bug.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.