Meanings
- uncountablePretentious, incomprehensible, or overly technical language, especially legal or bureaucratic jargon.
Teachout has a gift for slicing through the bafflegab and revealing that the grifter's patter disguises nothing more than unimaginative, sociopathic scams.
2020 July 29, Cory Doctorow, “Break 'Em Up”, in Pluralistic, retrieved 02 Aug 20201 more example
Toss in a few technical terms that most people don't understand—"stochastic" this, "regression" that—and you can use people's justified respect for math and science to get them nodding along. This is granularity as bafflegab.
2015 September 29, Philip E. Tetlock, Dan Gardner, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, Crown, →ISBNSynonyms: gobbledygook
present singular third person bafflegabs · participle present bafflegabbing · participle past bafflegabbed · past bafflegabbed
- rareTo use pretentious, incomprehensible, or overly technical language.
Synonyms & antonyms
nounPretentious, incomprehensible, or overly technical language, especially legal or bureaucratic jargon.
Origin
From baffle + gab, coined 1952.
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
bafflegab. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/bafflegab
“bafflegab.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/bafflegab. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “bafflegab,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/bafflegab.
Source: bafflegab on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.