Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

The sentence employs three distinct meanings of the word buffalo. The idea that one can construct a grammatically correct sentence consisting of nothing but repetitions of ‘buffalo’ was independently discovered several times in the 20th century. The earliest known written example appears in the original manuscript for Dmitri Borgmann’s 1965 book Language on Vacation.

About Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo in brief

The sentence employs three distinct meanings of the word buffalo. It has been discussed in literature in various forms since 1967. The idea that one can construct a grammatically correct sentence consisting of nothing but repetitions of ‘buffalo’ was independently discovered several times in the 20th century. The earliest known written example appears in the original manuscript for Dmitri Borgmann’s 1965 book Language on Vacation.

A sentence with eight consecutive buffalos is featured in Steven Pinker’s 1994 book The Language Instinct as an example of a sentence that is’seemingly nonsensical’ but grammatical. In 1972, William J. Rapaport, now a professor at the University at Buffalo but then a graduate student at Indiana University, came up with versions containing five and ten instances of ‘Buffalo’