wug

Meaning

Noun

• A mythical little creature that looks rather like a bird, used in the so-called wug test to investigate the acquisition of the plural form in English-speaking children.
• In folk taxonomy, a creature with worm or insect features; colloquially, a bug or creepy-crawly.

Origin

• Pseudoword, coined in the 1950s by Dr. Jean Berko Gleason as a word that children taking the test would not have heard before.