Mojibake

//ˌməʊd͡ʒiˈbɑːki// noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Corrupt characters or letters, especially resulting from being displayed or transferred through an inappropriate character set or encoding. uncountable

    "Alas, you'll even see “text” files where some lines have one encoding but other lines have different encodings. You are guaranteed to see mojibake."

Synonyms

All synonyms
krakozyabry

Example

More examples

"Alas, you'll even see “text” files where some lines have one encoding but other lines have different encodings. You are guaranteed to see mojibake."

Etymology

Borrowed from Japanese 文字化け (mojibake), from 文字 (moji, “character”) + 化ける (bakeru, “to transform, take a different form”, generally in a negative way).

Related phrases

character set

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