Placeholder word

In linguistics, a placeholder word or a placeholder is a word that is used in place of an exact word. In some cases they are used in speech to replace a forgotten word or a word about which the speaker is unsure. For example the writer may be unsure whether the technical word would be familiar to the readers or the speaker themselves is unsure which word to use. These words, such as "thingummyjig" are not part of standard written language and are not captured well by text corpora. These may replace both names of objects ("thingummabob") and the personal names (placeholder names, e.g., "Mr. Whatshisname"). Placeholder words are often used to convey vagueness. Other means to introduce vagueness are the use of taxonomic nouns with adaptors ("kind of tree"), generic words ("thing", "stuff"), etc. Some authors, e.g., Neil Grave, include generic words ("thing", "stuff") in the category of placeholder words as well. At the same time, Neil Grave notes that the generic words may perform a large number other functions, e.g., to be a vague category marker (as in "shorts and T-shirts, and stuff").

A thorough treatment of vague language, including placeholder words was provided by Joanna Channell. In particular, she demonstrates that dictionaries often provide inadequate definitions and explanations of vague lexical items.

Some earlier studies that did not yet adopt the term "placeholder" use the terms "filler", "dummy". The terms "lexical filler", "oblitive noun/verb" are used to denote what Vera Podlesskaya calls "hesitation markers", used when a speaker is temporarily unable to recall the exact name of the object.