Malarkey

//məˈlɑːki// name, noun, slang

name, noun, slang ·Common ·High school level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Nonsense; rubbish. informal

    "I decided it was a bunch of malarkey and stopped reading about halfway through."

  2. 2
    empty rhetoric or insincere or exaggerated talk wordnet
Proper Noun
  1. 1
    A surname.

Synonyms

All synonyms
windabsurdityall my eyeall my eye and betty martinapplesaucebafflegab

Example

More examples

"Personally, I think that's a bunch of malarkey."

Etymology

Of unknown origin; the word was popularized by the Irish-American cartoonist Thomas Aloysius (“Tad”) Dorgan (1877–1929), who started using it in cartoons on March 9, 1922. Maybe from Irish mallachtóireacht or Greek μαλακίες (malakíes)

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.