Pericombobulation
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Disturbance and confusion. countable, humorous, uncountable
"Because we have cultured, Euro accents and enunciate properly, we try and slip made up words into our meetings and watch the USers eat them up because like the saying about the bigger the lie, the more people believe it, the more syllables a word has the more readily they will accept it. Example: "We have identified an anuspeptic, some would say phrasmotic, phased paradigm shift in the market of interphrastic proportions. It's causing much contrafribbilarities^([sic]) and indeed much pericombobulation in the ABC1 sector. Frankly, we're Donald Ducked.""
Example
More examples"Because we have cultured, Euro accents and enunciate properly, we try and slip made up words into our meetings and watch the USers eat them up because like the saying about the bigger the lie, the more people believe it, the more syllables a word has the more readily they will accept it. Example: "We have identified an anuspeptic, some would say phrasmotic, phased paradigm shift in the market of interphrastic proportions. It's causing much contrafribbilarities^([sic]) and indeed much pericombobulation in the ABC1 sector. Frankly, we're Donald Ducked.""
Etymology
Blend of peri- + discombobulation. From a 1987 episode of the British television comedy Blackadder, in which Dr. Samuel Johnson boasts about his newly completed dictionary containing every word in the English language. Blackadder subsequently uses a number of newly-invented words to perplex him: "I'm anaspeptic, frasmotic, even compunctuous to have caused you such pericombobulation."
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.