gibberish
EnglishEdit
EtymologyEdit
ca. 16th century. Either an onomatopoeia, imitating to the sound of chatter, probably influenced by jabber, or derived from the root of the Irish gob (“the mouth”).[1]
PronunciationEdit
NounEdit
gibberish (usually uncountable, plural gibberishes)
- Speech or writing that is unintelligible, incoherent or meaningless.
- 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne, chapter 12, in The Scarlet Letter, a Romance, Boston, Mass.: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, OCLC 223202227:
- Such gibberish as children may be heard amusing themselves with.
- 1887, H. Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure[2]:
- Could it be, after all, that the whole story was true, and the writing on the sherd was not a forgery, or the invention of some crack-brained, long-forgotten individual? And if so, could it be that Leo was the man that She was waiting for - the dead man who was to be born again! Impossible! The whole thing was gibberish! Who ever heard of a man being born again?
- Needlessly obscure or overly technical language.
- A language game, comparable to pig Latin, in which one inserts a nonsense syllable before the first vowel in each syllable of a word.
SynonymsEdit
- gibber
- See also Thesaurus:nonsense
TranslationsEdit
unintelligible speech or writing
needlessly obscure or overly technical language
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- The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables, removing any numbers. Numbers do not necessarily match those in definitions. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.
Translations to be checked
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See alsoEdit
- double Dutch
- framis
- gobbledygook, gobbledegook
- galimatias
- jargon
- mumbo jumbo
- nonsense
- rhubarb rhubarb
AdjectiveEdit
gibberish (comparative more gibberish, superlative most gibberish)