Word salad

Word salad is language with meaningless, scrambled words. It is unintelligible, which means a listener cannot find any meaning in the spoken sentence. The words in the sentence may or may not be in grammatically correct order.

'Word salad' is most often seen as a symptom of a neurological or mental disorder. The term is often used in psychiatry and theoretical linguistics to describe language which native speakers judge is meaningless.

 In mental health diagnoses 
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 the words they spoke did not make sense. It appears in people with dementia and schizophrenia, and after anoxic brain injury.

It may be present as:
 Receptive aphasia: damage to brain centres dealing with language.
 Schizophasia: incoherent babbling, sometimes a symptom of schizophrenia.
 Logorrhea: a mental condition characterized by excessive talking.
 Graphorrhea: a written version of word salad, rarer than logorrhea in schizophrenics.

 In computing 
Word salad can be generated by a computer program for various purposes.

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.

Lorem ipsum is a dummy text that is mainly used to show what text on a page or website would look like.

 Related pages 
 Scat singing
 Glossolalia
 Thought disorder
 Gibberish
 Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

 References 

Category:Medical signs
Category:Language