Wig Wig A wig is a head covering made from human hair, animal hair, or synthetic fiber. The word wig is short for periwig., which makes its earliest known appearance in the English language in William Shakespeare's "The Two Gentlemen of Verona". Julia, disguised as the boy Sebastian, says "I'll get me such a coloured periwig." [II,2.81] Some people wear wigs to disguise baldness; a wig may be used as a less intrusive and less expensive alternative to medical therapies for restoring hair or for a religious reason. In Egyptian society men and women commonly had clean shaven or close cropped
Nonce word neologisms. The term "nonce word" was apparently the creation of James Murray, the influential editor of the "Oxford English Dictionary". Nonce words are sometimes used to study the development of language in children because they allow researchers to test how children treat words of which they have no prior knowledge. This permits inferences about the default assumptions children make about new word meanings, syntactic structure, etc. "Wug" is among the earliest known nonce words used in language learning studies, and is best known for its use in Jean Berko's "Wug test", in which children were presented with a novel object,