paraphraselike

Paraphraselike is an adjective used to describe text or expressions that resemble a paraphrase, meaning a restatement of another's ideas in different words while preserving the original meaning. The label is typically applied in linguistics, editing, and natural language processing to indicate a writing style or generated output that is not a direct quotation but closely mirrors source content.

Etymology: formed from paraphrase and the suffix -like, signaling resemblance. The term is descriptive rather than a formal linguistic category and is used to discuss the degree of restatement relative to the original text.

In practice, paraphraselike passages vary in how much they change wording or structure. Genuine paraphrase aims to preserve meaning with substantial lexical and syntactic changes; paraphraselike content may risk low originality or high similarity to a source when attribution is missing. In computational contexts, paraphraselike outputs are often generated to rephrase ideas for summarization, style variation, or to adapt content across languages or registers. Assessing such outputs involves semantic similarity measures and checks for plagiarism, attribution, and fidelity to the source.

See also Paraphrase, Rewording, Plagiarism, Summarization, Natural language processing. Notes: The term is informal and its interpretation can depend on context and disciplinary guidelines.