Galimatias
noun ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 nonsense, gobbledygook uncountable
"[…] and the old lady listened in silence, solemnly, rather coldly, as if she thought such talk a good deal of a galimatias: she belonged to the old-fashioned school and held that a young lady was sufficiently catalogued when it was said that she had a dazzling complexion or the finest eyes in the world."
- 2 confused mixture; hodgepodge uncountable
Example
More examples"[…] and the old lady listened in silence, solemnly, rather coldly, as if she thought such talk a good deal of a galimatias: she belonged to the old-fashioned school and held that a young lady was sufficiently catalogued when it was said that she had a dazzling complexion or the finest eyes in the world."
Etymology
Borrowed from French galimatias, first attested in 1653 in Sir Thomas Urquhart's translation of Rabelais's works.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.