Meanings
- emphatichumorousnot comparableoften(Strictly) forbidden or prohibited.
Or was it because he [Mark Zuckerberg] has since been steeped in the relentless positivity of Silicon Valley, where it is verboten to imagine a bad outcome?
2018 August 2, Kara Swisher, “The expensive education of Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 17 Feb 20241 more example
Before that, students and professors could date whomever we wanted; the next day we were off-limits to one another—verboten, traife, dangerous (and perhaps, therefore, all the more alluring).
2015 February 27, Laura Kipnis, “Sexual paranoia strikes academe”, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Washington, D.C.: Chronicle of Higher Education Inc., →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 22 Jul 2020Synonyms: banned, disallowed, proscribed, banned, disallowed, forbidden, impermissible, illegal
Synonyms & antonyms
adjective(Strictly) forbidden or prohibited.
More synonyms by meaning
adjectiveexcluded from use or mention
Synonym sets from Open English WordNet, CC BY 4.0.
Origin
- Germanverboten“banned, forbidden, prohibited”
- Englishverboten
Unadapted borrowing from German verboten (“banned, forbidden, prohibited”). Doublet of forbidden.
More words from German
Full word history & related roots →Rhymes & wordplay
Rhymes with verboten
All rhymes →Cite this entry
verboten. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/verboten
“verboten.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/verboten. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “verboten,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/verboten.
Source: verboten on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.