This study distinguishes the most common ‘placeholder' words in the language of British adults and teenagers (like thing(y), stuff, whatsit) and examines them from a syntactic, semantic and pragmatic viewpoint. These semantically almost empty words are multifunctional in communication and their meaning has to be inferred by the listener (Jucker et al., 2003). The findings indicate that the significance of these words mainly lies in their pragmatic functions and that they hold characteristic attributes of pragmatic markers.