gibberish

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.

• IPA^(key): /ˈd͡ʒɪb.ə.ɹɪʃ/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

gibberish (usually uncountable, plural gibberishes)

1. Speech or writing that is unintelligible, incoherent or meaningless.
   • 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne, chapter 12, in The Scarlet Letter, a Romance, Boston, Mass.: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, →OCLC:

     Such gibberish as children may be heard amusing themselves with.

   • 1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, →OCLC:

     Could it be, after all, that the whole story was true, and the writing on the sherd was not a forgery, or the invention of some crack-brained, long-forgotten individual? And if so, could it be that Leo was the man that She was waiting for - the dead man who was to be born again! Impossible! The whole thing was gibberish! Who ever heard of a man being born again?

   • 2022 December 31, Matteo Wong, “Hollywood’s Love Affair With Fictional Languages”, in The Atlantic:

     The Game of Thrones novels were best sellers without fleshed-out Dothraki; the languages in Star Wars, one of the most successful franchises ever, are mostly gibberish, even if Han Solo claims to understand Chewbacca’s bestial warbling.

2. Needlessly obscure or overly technical language.
3. (uncountable) A language game, comparable to pig Latin, in which one inserts a nonsense syllable before the first vowel in each syllable of a word.

• gibber
• See also Thesaurus:nonsense

• gibberishy

• double Dutch
• framis
• gobbledygook, gobbledegook
• galimatias
• jargon
• mumbo jumbo
• nonsense
• rhubarb rhubarb

gibberish (comparative more gibberish, superlative most gibberish)

1. unintelligible, incoherent or meaningless