Word salad

From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Word salad is language with meaningless, scrambled words. It is a "confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases".[1]

'Word salad' is most often used for a symptom of a neurological or mental disorder. The words may or may not be grammatically correct. The key thing is that a listener cannot get any meaning from them. The term is often used in psychiatry and theoretical linguistics to describe language which native speakers judge is meaningless.

In mental health diagnoses[change | change source]

Word salad occurs in neurological or psychological cases in which a person tries to communicate, and words and phrases come out – but make no sense. Often, the person is unaware that they did not make sense. It appears in people with dementia and schizophrenia,[2] and after anoxic brain injury.

It may be present as:

In computing[change | change source]

Word salad can be generated by a computer program for various purposes.[5]

Mojibake, also called Buchstabensalat ("letter salad") in German, is an effect similar to word salad, in which an assortment of seemingly-random text is generated.

Related pages[change | change source]

References[change | change source]

  1. "Definition of "word salad". Oxford University Press. 2012. Archived from the original on 2013-11-04. Retrieved 2014-08-07.
  2. Shives, Louise Rebraca (2008). Basic concepts of psychiatric-mental health nursing. Philadelphia: Wolters Kluwer / Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. p. 112. ISBN 978-0-7817-9707-8.
  3. "Merck Manual". merckmanuals.com. Merck Publishing. Retrieved 2014-12-06.
  4. Geschwind, Norman (1974). Selected papers on language and the brain (2. print. ed.). Dordrecht ; Boston: Reidel. p. 80. ISBN 9789027702623.
  5. Berinato, Scott (April 2007). "The scourge of image spam: image spam techniques". Cso : The Resource for Security Executives. 6 (4). CXO Media Inc. ISSN 1540-904X.