Meanings
- uncountableAnything worthless or incomprehensible; junk.
It rained gubbish, now; all was gubbish, wherever he looked.
2016, Michael Bérubé, The Secret Life of Stories, page 1053 more examples
But by the time the novel is over we are left with the perception that the autistic boy is living in a kind of precog vision of a future decaying into “gubbish,” into a dead simulacrum from which all animating spirit has been leached ( a key Dickian concept ), as real or more so in some sense than the consensus reality of the other characters.
1990, Norman Spinrad, Science Fiction in the Real World, page 208All that kipple, gubbish, garble and abomination which Alice James Raccoona Tiptree Sheldon, Jr., showed for what it is when she appeared, smiling a little uncertainly, from her postbox in McLean, Virginia.
1992, Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, page 184How'd you get your information, the stuff on the index cards? Which, anyway, is probably all gubbish.
2017, Dean Koontz, The Silent Corner, page 102
Origin
Blend of garbage + rubbish, coined by Philip K. Dick in his 1964 novel Martian Time-Slip.
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
gubbish. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/gubbish
“gubbish.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/gubbish. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “gubbish,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/gubbish.
Source: gubbish on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.