What does 和製英語 Wasei Eigo mean?

Wasei-eigo is vocabulary made in Japan out of English materials. The words look English, are assembled from English components, and either do not exist in English or mean something else there.

The construction

和 (wa) means Japanese, in the old sense used for domestic things as against imported ones. 製 (sei) is made or manufactured, the character on a label saying where something was produced. 英語 (eigo) is English.

Manufactured-in-Japan English. The term is precise and slightly industrial, and it treats the words as products rather than as errors.

Why calling it broken English is wrong

Because these are Japanese words. A speaker using one is not attempting English and missing; they are using their own language, in which the term is standard, correctly spelled and understood by everyone around them.

English does this constantly in the other direction. It took a French word for a thing French does not use it for, called a garment a negligee, and nobody describes English speakers as failing at French. Borrowing reshapes what it borrows. That is what borrowing is.

The two ways it happens

Compounding, where English parts are joined into something English never assembled: an office worker becomes a salary man, dressing as a character becomes costume play. And drift, where a borrowed word narrows or shifts, so an English term arrives and settles into a job its source language would not recognise.

Clipping runs alongside both, since long loans get shortened, which is where anime and mecha come from.

The round trip

Some of these come back. Cosplay was assembled in Japan in the 1980s from two English words and has since become ordinary English, appearing in English dictionaries and used by people with no connection to Japan.

That is a full circuit: English parts, Japanese assembly, English adoption. The word is now simultaneously a Japanese coinage and an English word, and there is no useful sense in which either language owns it.

Why this page exists

Because it names the mechanism behind a good deal of the rest of this section. Once the category is visible, the individual cases stop looking like curiosities and start looking like a system doing exactly what it should.