Definitions
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun Any sequence of
letters that is not a word.
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word non-word.
Examples
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In that letter to Axel Kaun he placed himself on "the road toward this, for me, very desirable literature of the non-word," but a few lines later he states his program with a contrary succinctness: "Word-storming in the name of beauty."
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In that letter to Axel Kaun he placed himself on "the road toward this, for me, very desirable literature of the non-word," but a few lines later he states his program with a contrary succinctness: "Word-storming in the name of beauty."
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The first time I attended Book Expo was so long ago it was called ABA, the American Booksellers Association pause to shout out to my fellow curmudgeons who don't believe that mashing together a non-word like "Expo" with a perfectly good word like "Book" is an improvement on either one, nor that putting the mashup next to "America" can turn the latter into an adjective.
Peter Ginna: An Insider's Guide to the Characters of BookExpo America Peter Ginna 2011
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No "I" in "Team" Award: On Ice Loves Coco, Coco is pumped to show her hubby her new Licious clothing line at the factory... until Ice-T points out something her whole crew had apparently missed: All the shirts are printed with the non-word "licous" — or, phonetically, "lick-us."
Top Moments: Jake Gyllenhaal Gets Naked and The Bachelorette Bores 2011
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You had to swallow mint chip not to scream, you had to find a semi-quiet area, or, in a sense, a non-word.
Patricide: A Romance Chris Vola 2012
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The first time I attended Book Expo was so long ago it was called ABA, the American Booksellers Association pause to shout out to my fellow curmudgeons who don't believe that mashing together a non-word like "Expo" with a perfectly good word like "Book" is an improvement on either one, nor that putting the mashup next to "America" can turn the latter into an adjective.
Peter Ginna: An Insider's Guide to the Characters of BookExpo America Peter Ginna 2011
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Finally, what's with the use of the word (or non-word) "ain't" Where on earth did they go to school?
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In a post criticizing Sarah Palin's use of the non-word "refudiate," Little Green Footballs offered a handy Google Map showing the location of the proposed community center relative to Ground Zero and claims that the "Ground Zero Mosque" hysteria is exactly that: hysteria.
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Following Palin's widely-mocked use of the non-word "refudiate," comedian and HuffPost blogger Andy Borowitz joked about "Palinese" on last week's episode of the program.
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In case you couldn't make it through the whole two minutes, it consists of inane jabbering and of the hosts flinging around the non-word "Darwinism", as if evolution were an exotic opinion or a cult and not the foundation of biology.
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