"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." is a grammatically valid sentence used as an example of how homophones can be used to create complicated constructs. It was featured in Steven Pinker's 1994 book The Language Instinct, but is known to have been around before February 1992 when it was posted to Linguist List by William J. Rapaport.[1]
Sentences of this type, although not in such a refined form, have been known for a long time. A classical example is a proverb "Don't trouble trouble until trouble troubles you".
The sentence uses three different readings of the word "buffalo":
The plural form of "buffalo", that is, an American Bison, white buffalo, or African buffalo. The use of the plural enables the omission of articles.
Buffalo, New York, the second-largest city in the state of New York
A verb meaning to confuse, deceive, or intimidate
Marking each "buffalo" with its use as numbered above gives:
Thus, the sentence turns into a description of the pecking order in the social hierarchy of buffalo from the Buffalo zoo:
Or, changing the grammatical structure slightly for easier understanding:
Other than the obvious confusion caused by the homophones, the sentence is difficult to parse for several reasons:
The use of "buffalo" as a verb is not particularly common
The removal of syntactically significant words ("the", "that", etc.) to such a degree is not a common linguistic approach
The omission of punctuation makes it difficult to read the flow of the sentence
The example has the structure of a garden path sentence, i.e., the sentence that cannot be parsed by reading one word at a time without backtracking.
The length of the sentence reaches the limitations of human ability to parse structure and meaning
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Punctuated, the sentence looks like:
By adding 'that', it would look like
If the homophones were replaced with other words, it would look like
Using common articles and punctuation:
Using synonyms: