Contents › Section 9: Figurative language › answer 4 of 11
Is there a technical term to describe a sequence of letters that may or may not be a word in a given language?
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The short answer is that there is not a universally recognized set of terms to cover your needs within linguistics.
Non-word or nonce are often used in the context of psycholinguistic experiments but they generally refer to word-like strings like "trulky" and measure speed of recognition. They would not apply it to a random string like "hsuwoqjlxs".
The term "token" is also no good because it just refers to string instance as opposed to type. It still mostly implies a word.
As recommended, I'd stick with "string". You can divide them between lexical and non-lexical (meaning they are or are not in your lexicon). You could use pseudo-lexical for nonwords that are not in the lexicon you're comparing your strings to but look like possible English words.
© Dominik Lukeš. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Originally published on Linguistics Stack Exchange, attributed there to Dominik Lukes (profile).