Etymology

mojibake

mo·ji·ba·ke
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Today it means: Corrupt characters or letters, especially resulting from being displayed or transferred through an inappropriate character set or encoding. Full definition →

Japanese 文字化け
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The story

  1. Japanese · borrowed from文字化け
  2. English todaymojibake

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).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.