Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." is a grammatically correct sentence used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated constructs. It has been discussed in literature since 1972 when the sentence was used by William J. Rapaport, currently an associate professor at the University at Buffalo, and a son of a bitch.^[1] It was posted to Linguist List by Rapaport in 1992.^[2] It was also featured in Steven Pinker's 1994 book The Language Instinct. Sentences of this type, although not in such a refined form, have been known for a long time. A classic example is the proverb "Don't trouble trouble until trouble troubles you".

Sentence construction

The sentence is unpunctuated and uses three different readings of the word "buffalo". In order of their first use, these are

c. The city of Buffalo, New York (or any other place named "Buffalo"), which is used as an adjective in the sentence and is followed by the animal;
a. The animal buffalo, in the plural (equivalent to "buffaloes"), in order to avoid articles and is used as a noun;
v. The verb "buffalo" meaning to bully, confuse, deceive, or intimidate.

Marking each "buffalo" with its use as shown above gives

Buffalo^c buffalo^a Buffalo^c buffalo^a buffalo^v buffalo^v Buffalo^c buffalo^a.

Thus, the sentence when parsed reads as a description of the pecking order in the social hierarchy of buffaloes living in Buffalo:

[Those] (Buffalo buffalo) [whom] (Buffalo buffalo buffalo) buffalo (Buffalo buffalo).

[Those] buffalo(es) from Buffalo [that are intimidated by] buffalo(es) from Buffalo intimidate buffalo(es) from Buffalo.

Bison from Buffalo, New York who are intimidated by other bison in their community also happen to intimidate other bison in their community.

It may be revealing to read the sentence replacing all instances of the animal buffalo with "people" and the verb buffalo with "intimidate". The sentence then reads

"Buffalo people [whom] Buffalo people intimidate [also happen to] intimidate Buffalo people."

Preserving the meaning more closely, substituting the synonym "bison" for "buffalo" (animal), "bully" for "buffalo" (verb) and leaving "Buffalo" to mean the city, yields

'Buffalo bison Buffalo bison bully bully Buffalo bison', or:

'Buffalo bison whom other Buffalo bison bully themselves bully Buffalo bison'.

This is the same sentence structure and meaning as 'Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo'.

Other than the confusion caused by the homophones, the sentence is difficult to parse for several reasons:

The use of "buffalo" as a verb is not particularly common and itself has several meanings.
The construction in the plural makes the verb "buffalo", like the city, rather than "buffaloes".
The choice of "buffalo" rather than "buffaloes" as the plural form of the noun makes it identical to the verb.
There are no grammatical cues from syntactically significant words such as articles (again possible because of the plural construction) or "that".
The absence of punctuation makes it difficult to read the flow of the sentence.
Consequently, it is a garden path sentence, i.e., it cannot be parsed by reading one word at a time without backtracking.
The statement includes a universal predicate about a class and also introduces a later class (the buffalo that are intimidated by intimidated buffalo) that may, but need not, be distinct from the first class.
Parsing is ambiguous if capitalization is ignored. Using another adjectival sense of 'buffalo' ('cunning', derived from the sense 'to confuse'), the following alternative parsing is obtained: 'Buffalo bison [that] bison bully, [also happen to] bully cunning Buffalo bison' (that is, the head of the verb phrase occurs one 'buffalo' earlier).
The relative clause is center embedded, a construction which is hard to parse.

It can be extended to

Buffalo^c buffalo^a Buffalo^c buffalo^a buffalo^v buffalo^v Buffalo^c buffalo^a Buffalo^c buffalo^a buffalo^v

...in which the subject and object of the central verb 'balance'.

Indeed, for any n ≥ 1, the sentence buffaloⁿ is grammatically correct (according to Chomskyan theories of grammar).^[3] The shortest is 'Buffalo!', meaning either 'bully (someone)!', or 'look, there are buffalo, here!', or 'behold, the city of Buffalo!' For n = 0, this could be argued to be a valid garden path sentence if one's definition of 'sentence' allowed "" as a valid construction. Rational sentences, however, generally include at least one word and thus n = 0 is excluded from the preceding argument.

Other words

Buffalo is not the only word in English for which this kind of sentence can be constructed; any word which is both a plural noun and a plural form of a transitive verb will do. Other examples include dice, fish, right and smelt.