Gibberish
//ˈd͡ʒɪ.bə.ɹɪʃ// adj, noun
adj, noun ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
Noun
- 1 Speech or writing that is unintelligible, incoherent or meaningless. uncountable, usually
"Such gibberish as children may be heard amusing themselves with."
- 2 unintelligible talking wordnet
- 3 Needlessly obscure or overly technical language. uncountable, usually
- 4 A language game, comparable to pig Latin, in which one inserts a nonsense syllable before the first vowel in each syllable of a word. uncountable, usually
Adjective
- 1 unintelligible, incoherent or meaningless
Example
More examples"On some OS's you get gibberish for filenames with full-width characters so when downloading please change to a suitable filename."
Etymology
First attested mid-16th century. Origin obscure. Possibly from *gibber, of onomatopoeic origin imitating to the sound of chatter, possibly from or influenced by jabber, + -ish denoting the name of a language (compare English, Finnish, Spanish, etc.). The verb gibber, first attested circa 1600, is usually regarded as a back-formation from gibberish.
Related phrases
More for "gibberish"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.