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 words are often used to convey vagueness. Other means to introduce vagueness are the use of taxonomic nouns with adaptors, generic words, etc. Some authors, e.g., Neil Grave, include generic words in the category of placeholder words as well. At the same time, Neil Grave notes that the generic words may perform a large number of other functions, e.g., to be a vague category marker.