nonsense
Meanings
- Letters or words, in writing or speech, that have no meaning or pattern or seem to have no meaning.
- An untrue statement.
- That which is silly, illogical and lacks any meaning, reason or value; that which does not make sense.
- Something foolish.
- A type of poetry that contains strange or surreal ideas, as, for example, that written by Edward Lear.
- A damaged DNA sequence whose products are not biologically active, that is, that does nothing.
- To make nonsense of;
- To attempt to dismiss as nonsense; to ignore or belittle the significance of something; to render unimportant or puny.
- To joke around, to waste time
- Nonsensical.
- Resulting from the substitution of a nucleotide in a sense codon, causing it to become a stop codon (not coding for an amino-acid).
- An emphatic rejection of something one has just heard and does not believe or agree with.
Pronunciation
Word forms
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *né Proto-Germanic *ne Proto-Indo-European *ís? Proto-Indo-European *h₁óynos Proto-Germanic *ainaz Proto-Germanic *nainaz Proto-West Germanic *nain Old English nān Middle English non ▲ Old English nān Old English nān- Middle English non- English non- Proto-Indo-European *sent-der. Proto-Italic *sentjō Latin sentiō Proto-Indo-European *-tus Proto-Italic *-tus Latin -tus Latin sēnsusbor. Proto-Germanic *sinnaz Frankish *sinnbor. Vulgar Latin *sennus Old French sensbor. Middle English sense English sense English nonsense 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”).