xenism

Not valid in Scrabble

It's a recognised English word, but it isn't in the official NASPA Scrabble word list.

Scrabble points
15
Words With Friends
17
Letters
6

Definition of xenism

1 sense · 1 part of speech · etymology included

noun

  1. A word used in utterances of a language but generally marked as foreign.
    “The first stage is when a word from one language is used in an utterance of another language in order to create a somewhat exotic effect. At this stage, the word is not a borrowing, but rather what they term a xenism. An example of a xenism used in an English sentence would be At the harbour, we went for a sail in a gulet, where gulet is the word for a type of Turkish sail boat, which has no real equivalent in English.”
    “My objective was to collect all loanwords, such that this work is as complete as possible, though some words may not be commonly used by speakers of a given language that seem to be pure Arabic xenisms (see Swahili hamsa ‘five’ < ḫamsa 841).”

Definitions from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA.

Etymology

Borrowed from French xénisme, from Ancient Greek ξενισμός (xenismós, “strangeness, novelty”).

Anagrams of xenism

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