negation - Is "dispreferred" a mainstream word in English?


I just recently came across the word dispreferred in a linguistic document. I have never heard the word used before, rather I generally hear something like "preferred something else" in everyday conversation. Is dispreferred a linguistics/language specific term or does it have more widespread usage in non-technical conversations? As I type the word dispreferred, I see a red underline indicating that I have entered a misspelled word.



Answer



It's not in my Merriam-Webster or dictionary.reference.com, and I've never heard of it.


LanguageLog has some citations for it, but the article seems to confirm, if anything, that it's linguists' jargon.


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