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nonsense

Pronunciation: /ˈnɒn.səns/

The English word “nonsense” has 12 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. Letters or words, in writing or speech, that have no meaning or pattern or seem to have no meaning.
  2. An untrue statement.
  3. That which is silly, illogical and lacks any meaning, reason or value; that which does not make sense.
  4. Something foolish.
  5. A type of poetry that contains strange or surreal ideas, as, for example, that written by Edward Lear.
  6. A damaged DNA sequence whose products are not biologically active, that is, that does nothing.

verb

  1. To make nonsense of;
  2. To attempt to dismiss as nonsense; to ignore or belittle the significance of something; to render unimportant or puny.
  3. To joke around, to waste time

adjective

  1. Nonsensical.
  2. Resulting from the substitution of a nucleotide in a sense codon, causing it to become a stop codon (not coding for an amino-acid).

interjection

  1. An emphatic rejection of something one has just heard and does not believe or agree with.

Etymology

From non- (“no, none, lack of”) + sense, from c. 1610. Compare the semantically similar West Frisian ûnsin (“nonsense”), Dutch onzin (“nonsense”), German Unsinn (“nonsense”), English unsense (“nonsense”).

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.