Wiktionary
n. (context linguistics English) A unit of speech or text that respects the phonotactic restrictions of a language, but is not part of the lexicon
Wikipedia
A pseudoword or non-word is a unit of speech or text that appears to be an actual word in a certain language, while in fact it has no meaning in the lexicon. It is a kind of non-lexical vocable.
Such words without a meaning in a certain language or no occurrence in any text corpus or dictionary can be the result of (the interpretation of) a truly random signal, there will usually be an underlying deterministic source as is the case for:
- nonsense words (e.g. jabberwocky)
- nonce words
- ghost words (e.g. dord)
- cyphers (e.g. cesar's cypher for dog: grj)
- typos
When nonsensical words are stringed together, gibberish may arise. Word salad in contrast may contain legible and intelligible words but without semantic or syntactic correlation or coherence.