Conlang Terms in Plain Words

Every technical word you might see in the Languages tool, in one plain sentence with a small example. You never need to read this top to bottom. Land here from a term you did not recognize, get your one sentence, and go back to building.

If you are brand new, start with Build a Language, Start Here instead. This page is the dictionary; that page is the lesson.

Words and meaning

Word (headword). The word in your language, the way you would list it in a dictionary. kima.

Gloss. What a word means, in your everyday language. The gloss of kima is “river.” When the tool asks for a gloss, it is asking what the word means.

Lexicon. A fancy word for your dictionary, the whole collection of words you have coined.

Etymology. The story of where a word came from, like “from an older word for flowing water.” Optional, and only as detailed as you enjoy.

Part of speech. Whether a word is a noun, a verb, an adjective, and so on. kima is a noun.

Sounds

Phoneme. A single sound your language uses, like the k in kima. Your set of these is your sound palette.

Sound inventory. The full set of sounds (consonants and vowels) your language is allowed to use. You pick it once on the Sounds tab, and the word generator stays inside it.

Consonant and vowel. The two families of sounds. Vowels are the open, sung sounds (a, i, u). Consonants are everything else (p, t, k, m, n). You list both.

Syllable. One beat of a word. kima has two: ki and ma.

Onset, nucleus, coda. The three slots in a syllable. The onset is the sound that starts it (k), the nucleus is the vowel in the middle (i), and the coda is the sound that ends it, if any. You tell the tool which sounds may sit in each slot.

Phonotactics. The rules for which sounds can go together and where. It sounds intimidating, but in the tool it is just the syllable shapes you allow. Set them and the generator never coins a word your language would not say.

Romanization. How you spell a word using ordinary letters, even after you have drawn your own script. kima is the romanization. It is always kept underneath your fancy glyphs, so your text never breaks and a screen reader can read it aloud.

IPA. A standard alphabet linguists use to write down exactly how something is pronounced. Totally optional here. If you do not know it, just type the pronunciation however makes sense to you.

Writing systems

Script. The way a language is written down: its letters or symbols.

Glyph. A single drawn symbol in your script, like one letter.

Alphabet. A script with one symbol per sound, the way English works.

Abugida. A script where each consonant carries a built-in vowel that you change with a small mark, the way Devanagari or Amharic works.

Syllabary. A script with one symbol per whole syllable (one for ka, one for ki, one for ku), the way Japanese kana works.

Logography. A script where a symbol stands for a whole word or idea, the way Chinese characters work.

Featural. A script whose letter shapes are built from the parts of how a sound is made, the way Korean Hangul works.

Private use area (PUA). A reserved stretch of the universal character standard where your hand-drawn letters live once they become a font, so they show up and export anywhere without colliding with real letters. You never have to think about it; the tool handles it.

Grammar

Morphology. The study of how words are built and changed from smaller pieces. In the tool, this is the Grammar tab.

Affix. A small piece added to a word to change it. The -s in “cats” is an affix.

Prefix, suffix, infix, circumfix. Affixes by where they attach: a prefix goes in front (un-), a suffix goes on the end (-ed), an infix goes inside the word, and a circumfix wraps around both ends.

Inflection. Changing a word to fit its job in a sentence, like “walk” becoming “walked” or “cat” becoming “cats.”

Declension and conjugation. Two kinds of inflection. Declension is how nouns change (for number or case); conjugation is how verbs change (for tense or person). You do not have to use these words; the tool just calls them tables.

Paradigm. The full table of a word’s forms, like all the ways one verb can be conjugated. Give the tool a base word and it can fill the table in for you.

Case. A marking on a noun that shows its role, like who is doing the action versus who it is done to. Many languages skip cases entirely, and so can yours.

Tense, aspect, mood. Three things a verb can carry: tense is when it happens (past, present), aspect is how it unfolds (finished, ongoing), and mood is the attitude (a fact, a wish, a command).

Gender or noun class. Groups that nouns fall into, which other words then agree with. “Gender” here is a grammar term, not always about male and female; some languages sort nouns into “animate” and “inanimate,” or many more.

Word order. The usual order of the doer, the action, and the thing acted on, like the subject-verb-object order of “the cat drinks milk.” You pick one and it guides the feel of your sentences.

Number system. What base your language counts in and what its number words are. Most use base ten, but yours can count by twelves or twenties if your world does.

Change over time

Sound change. A rule for how a sound shifts, like one sound softening into another between vowels. Apply a set of these and old words evolve into modern ones.

Diachrony. The study of how a language changes across time. The sound-change tools are the diachrony part of the suite.

Dialect (daughter language). A regional or later variety of your language. Mark one as derived by sound changes and the tool shows how your words come out in it, so a sister tongue falls right out of the rules you already wrote.

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Did not find your word? It probably is not needed to use the tool. Head back to Build a Language, Start Here or the full Languages and Conlangs reference and keep going.