metalinguistic
adjective
metalinguistic is an adjective meaning “Treating words as words, rather than interacting with their meaning” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled M-E-T-A-L-I-N-G-U-I-S-T-I-C, and it appears about once in every 37 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data).
What does metalinguistic mean?
adjective
- 1
Treating words as words, rather than interacting with their meaning.
- 2
Pertaining to metalinguistics.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is metalinguistic?
Metalinguistic appears about once in every 37 million words in written English, the 187,122nd most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Metalinguistic in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense treating words as words, rather than interacting with their meaning:
| Language | Words |
|---|---|
| Portuguese | metalinguístico |
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.