High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Phono-semantic matching (PSM) is a term in linguistics that refers to camouflaged borrowing in which a foreign word is matched with a phonetically and semantically similar pre-existent native word/root. It may alternatively be defined as the entry of a multisourced neologism that preserves both the meaning and the approximate sound of the parallel expression in the source language, using pre-existent words/roots of the target language.