Etymology

wug

W4U1G2

Today it means: An imaginary creature resembling a bird, used in the Wug Test to investigate the acquisition of the plural form in English-speaking children. Full definition →

English bug ← Middle English worm ← Old English wyrm
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wug · noun1

] 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.

wug · noun2

  1. Proto-Germanic*wurmiz
  2. Proto-West Germanic*wurmi
  3. Old Englishwyrm
  4. Middle Englishworm
  5. Englishworm
  6. Englishbug
  7. English todaywug

From worm + bug.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.