wug

• enPR: wŭg, IPA^(key): /wʌɡ/
• Rhymes: -ʌɡ

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.

wug (plural chiefly wugs; see usage notes)

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

• In the original result of the Wug Test, children consistently produced wugs for the plural. However, plurals other than the standard wugs are sometimes used humorously, including wuggen (by analogy with n-stem plurals such as oxen), weeg (by analogy with i-umlaut plurals such as feet), and wuggi (by analogy with Latinate plurals such as fungi).
• Other humorous forms include weese, wüge, nyug or wugim which are formed with the plural markers of other languages.

• Wug Test
• wug word

Blend of worm +‎ bug.

wug (plural wugs)

1. (anthropology) In folk taxonomy, a creature with worm or insect features; colloquially, a bug or creepy-crawly.^[1]