Why nonsense words give us a real giggle

SOME made-up words are funnier than others, according to research.

Scientists discovered that some made-up words such as subvick, bollyze and quingel make us laugh more than others, including tatinse, octeste and heashes.

this is because people find nonsense words with uncommon letter combinations more unexpected and humorous.

the study, published in the Journal of Memory and Language, examined the theory that some nonsense words are inherently funnier than others.

the team from the University of alberta, Canada, used a computer programme to generate thousands of random nonsense words. then 968 students were asked to compare two non-words and select the option they considered more humorous.

next they were shown a non-word and asked to rate how humorous they found it on a scale of one to 100.

researchers found some words such as blabesoc were funnier than other non-words, like anotain. they believe this is due to the word’s entropy – a mathematical measure of how ordered or predictable it is.

non-words like finglam, with uncommon letter combinations, were lower in entropy than other non-words like clester, which sound more common. they have more probable letter combinations and therefore higher entropy.

Chris Westbury, a psychology professor and lead author of the study, said: ‘the weirder the word is, the funnier the word is. funnier is a function of weirdness.’