A word (such as whatchamacallit) used by speakers to signal that they don't know or can't remember a more precise word for something. See also: What Is a Placeholder?
Examples and Observations:
"Placeholders are defined as expressions 'used when people cannot remember the name of a person or thing,' i.e., dummy nouns which can stand for item names, or for names of persons . . .. Such words have little or no semantic meaning and should rather be interpreted pragmatically. The placeholder words that Channell discusses . . . are thing, thingummy (with the variants thingummyjig and thingummybob), whatsisname, whatnot, whosit, and whatsit. . . . Incidentally, they are all defined as slang in Cassell's Dictionary of Slang (2000). . . .
"The situation where the next dialogue occurs reveals that Fanny does not know the name of the boy who was laughing with Achil and uses thingie as a placeholder:
Fanny: And I walked off and like I just walked away and Achil and thingy were laughing at, you know, just not at me at how how crap [<name>]Thingamajig occurs four times with reference to an object and twice with reference to a person. In (107) we meet 14-year-old Carola and Semantha . . . from Hackney:
Kate: [Yeah.]
Fanny: had been and how I had to go away.
(142304: 13-215)
Carola: Can I borrow your thingamajig?Semantha's reaction shows that there is no doubt that thingamajig belongs to the category of vague words. It obviously refers to an object that Carola would like to borrow, but Semantha apparently has no idea of what she is referring to. She might of course repeat the word just for the fun of it. Or is she ironical?"
Semantha: I don't know what thingamajig it is.
(14078-34)
(Anna-Brita Stenström, Gisle Andersen, and Ingrid Kristine Hasund, Trends in Teenage Talk: Corpus Compilation, Analysis, and Findings, John Benjamins, 2002)
