See pablum in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
{
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"text": "The juice from its hydro-power dam was needed to supply meager light to a million homes and to cook the pablum for two million brand-new babies.",
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"ref": "1971, Jules Archer, quoting Robert Francis Kennedy, “The Second Kennedy Assassination”, in 1968: Year of Crisis, New York, N.Y.: Julian Messner, →ISBN, page 94:",
"text": "\"If you want to be filled with pablum and tranquilizers,\" [Robert F.] Kennedy told crowds, \"then don’t vote for me. I'm not going to give you any tired answers. […] I'm going to tell it like it is.\"",
"type": "quote"
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33,
39
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"ref": "1992 October 23, Ben Wattenberg, “Writer likes [Bill] Clinton”, in The Daily Sentinel, volume 43, number 128, Pomeroy; Middleport, Ohio: Multimedia, Inc., →OCLC, page 2:",
"text": "The Republican argument today is pablum, mush and saccharine. (Which exhausts my edible metaphors.) Do Republicans really think that America's big problems are \"taxes\" and \"trust\"? Give me a cake.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"bold_text_offsets": [
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154,
161
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"ref": "1996, Glen Jeansonne, “Epilogue: ‘Can We All Get Along?’”, in Women of the Far Right: The Mothers’ Movement and World War II, Chicago, Ill.; London: University of Chicago Press, →ISBN, page 188:",
"text": "[Adolf] Hitler's career coincided with the growth of these tensions. He offered scapegoats, revenge, nationalism, racial superiority, and prowess at arms—pablums for a nervous people.",
"type": "quote"
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"bold_text_offsets": [
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33,
39
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"ref": "1996 May, David Hillel Gelernter, “Prologue: The Center of Time”, in 1939, the Lost World of the Fair, New York, N.Y.: Avon Books, →ISBN, page 29:",
"text": "Maybe we just don’t buy the pap, pablum and Pollyanification of the Futurama world view any longer because we are simply more sophisticated than the 1939ers.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"bold_text_offsets": [
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72,
78
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"ref": "2008, James Boyle, “A Creative Commons”, in The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (A Caravan Book), New Haven, Conn.; London: Yale University Press, →ISBN, page 200:",
"text": "To me, these points seem bland, boring, obvious—verging on tautology or pablum. To many believers in the worldview I have described, they are either straightforward heresy or a smokescreen for some real, underlying agenda—which is identified as communism, anarchism, or, somewhat confusingly, both.",
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"ref": "2021 August 23, Josh Blackman, “The Volokh Conspiracy: Noah Feldman Indulges in Brett Kavanaugh Fan Fiction on Dobbs”, in Reason, Los Angeles, Calif.: Reason Foundation, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 15 Jun 2025:",
"text": "And it [the Supreme Court] will have to elaborate on Justice [Anthony] Kennedy's nausea-inducing pablum about liberty and jurisprudences of doubt.",
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177
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"ref": "2022 July 27, Keith Schneider, “James Lovelock, whose Gaia theory saw the Earth as alive, dies at 103”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 07 Jul 2025:",
"text": "A few scientists greeted the hypothesis [the Gaia theory] as a thoughtful way to explain how living systems influenced the planet. Many others, however, called it New Age pablum.",
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],
"word": "單調乏味 /单调乏味"
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},
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},
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],
"word": "banálnōst"
},
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},
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"lang_code": "sv",
"sense": "something bland or simplistic",
"word": "snack"
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]
}
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"ipa": "/ˈpæbləm/",
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179,
186
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142,
149
]
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[
"type",
"type#Noun"
]
],
"raw_glosses": [
"(by extension, uncountable) Mushy, easily digested food; pap; (countable) a specific type of such food."
],
"senseid": [
"en:pap"
],
"tags": [
"US",
"broadly",
"uncountable",
"usually"
]
},
{
"categories": [
"English countable nouns",
"English derogatory terms",
"English terms with quotations",
"English uncountable nouns"
],
"examples": [
{
"bold_text_offsets": [
[
31,
37
]
],
"ref": "1971, Jules Archer, quoting Robert Francis Kennedy, “The Second Kennedy Assassination”, in 1968: Year of Crisis, New York, N.Y.: Julian Messner, →ISBN, page 94:",
"text": "\"If you want to be filled with pablum and tranquilizers,\" [Robert F.] Kennedy told crowds, \"then don’t vote for me. I'm not going to give you any tired answers. […] I'm going to tell it like it is.\"",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"bold_text_offsets": [
[
33,
39
]
],
"ref": "1992 October 23, Ben Wattenberg, “Writer likes [Bill] Clinton”, in The Daily Sentinel, volume 43, number 128, Pomeroy; Middleport, Ohio: Multimedia, Inc., →OCLC, page 2:",
"text": "The Republican argument today is pablum, mush and saccharine. (Which exhausts my edible metaphors.) Do Republicans really think that America's big problems are \"taxes\" and \"trust\"? Give me a cake.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"bold_text_offsets": [
[
154,
161
]
],
"ref": "1996, Glen Jeansonne, “Epilogue: ‘Can We All Get Along?’”, in Women of the Far Right: The Mothers’ Movement and World War II, Chicago, Ill.; London: University of Chicago Press, →ISBN, page 188:",
"text": "[Adolf] Hitler's career coincided with the growth of these tensions. He offered scapegoats, revenge, nationalism, racial superiority, and prowess at arms—pablums for a nervous people.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"bold_text_offsets": [
[
33,
39
]
],
"ref": "1996 May, David Hillel Gelernter, “Prologue: The Center of Time”, in 1939, the Lost World of the Fair, New York, N.Y.: Avon Books, →ISBN, page 29:",
"text": "Maybe we just don’t buy the pap, pablum and Pollyanification of the Futurama world view any longer because we are simply more sophisticated than the 1939ers.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"bold_text_offsets": [
[
72,
78
]
],
"ref": "2008, James Boyle, “A Creative Commons”, in The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (A Caravan Book), New Haven, Conn.; London: Yale University Press, →ISBN, page 200:",
"text": "To me, these points seem bland, boring, obvious—verging on tautology or pablum. To many believers in the worldview I have described, they are either straightforward heresy or a smokescreen for some real, underlying agenda—which is identified as communism, anarchism, or, somewhat confusingly, both.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"bold_text_offsets": [
[
97,
103
]
],
"ref": "2021 August 23, Josh Blackman, “The Volokh Conspiracy: Noah Feldman Indulges in Brett Kavanaugh Fan Fiction on Dobbs”, in Reason, Los Angeles, Calif.: Reason Foundation, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 15 Jun 2025:",
"text": "And it [the Supreme Court] will have to elaborate on Justice [Anthony] Kennedy's nausea-inducing pablum about liberty and jurisprudences of doubt.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"bold_text_offsets": [
[
171,
177
]
],
"ref": "2022 July 27, Keith Schneider, “James Lovelock, whose Gaia theory saw the Earth as alive, dies at 103”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 07 Jul 2025:",
"text": "A few scientists greeted the hypothesis [the Gaia theory] as a thoughtful way to explain how living systems influenced the planet. Many others, however, called it New Age pablum.",
"type": "quote"
}
],
"glosses": [
"Something overly bland or simplistic, especially speech or writing."
],
"links": [
[
"derogatory",
"derogatory"
],
[
"overly",
"overly"
],
[
"bland",
"bland#Adjective"
],
[
"simplistic",
"simplistic"
],
[
"speech",
"speech#Noun"
],
[
"writing",
"writing#Noun"
]
],
"raw_glosses": [
"(countable, uncountable, figurative, derogatory) Something overly bland or simplistic, especially speech or writing."
],
"synonyms": [
{
"word": "pabulum"
},
{
"word": "pap"
}
],
"tags": [
"US",
"countable",
"derogatory",
"figuratively",
"uncountable",
"usually"
]
}
],
"sounds": [
{
"ipa": "/ˈpæbləm/",
"tags": [
"Received-Pronunciation"
]
},
{
"audio": "LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-pablum.wav",
"mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/8/84/LL-Q1860_%28eng%29-Vealhurl-pablum.wav/LL-Q1860_%28eng%29-Vealhurl-pablum.wav.mp3",
"ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/8/84/LL-Q1860_%28eng%29-Vealhurl-pablum.wav/LL-Q1860_%28eng%29-Vealhurl-pablum.wav.ogg"
},
{
"ipa": "/ˈpæbl(ə)m/",
"tags": [
"General-American"
]
},
{
"audio": "LL-Q1860 (eng)-Naomi Persephone Amethyst (NaomiAmethyst)-pablum.wav",
"mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/6/6d/LL-Q1860_%28eng%29-Naomi_Persephone_Amethyst_%28NaomiAmethyst%29-pablum.wav/LL-Q1860_%28eng%29-Naomi_Persephone_Amethyst_%28NaomiAmethyst%29-pablum.wav.mp3",
"ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/6/6d/LL-Q1860_%28eng%29-Naomi_Persephone_Amethyst_%28NaomiAmethyst%29-pablum.wav/LL-Q1860_%28eng%29-Naomi_Persephone_Amethyst_%28NaomiAmethyst%29-pablum.wav.ogg"
}
],
"translations": [
{
"code": "cmn",
"lang": "Chinese Mandarin",
"lang_code": "cmn",
"roman": "dāndiào fáwèi",
"sense": "something bland or simplistic",
"tags": [
"adjective"
],
"word": "單調乏味 /单调乏味"
},
{
"code": "fi",
"lang": "Finnish",
"lang_code": "fi",
"sense": "something bland or simplistic",
"word": "puppu"
},
{
"code": "fr",
"lang": "French",
"lang_code": "fr",
"sense": "something bland or simplistic",
"tags": [
"feminine"
],
"word": "bouillie"
},
{
"code": "de",
"lang": "German",
"lang_code": "de",
"sense": "something bland or simplistic",
"tags": [
"masculine"
],
"word": "Einheitsbrei"
},
{
"code": "ru",
"lang": "Russian",
"lang_code": "ru",
"roman": "banálʹščina",
"sense": "something bland or simplistic",
"tags": [
"feminine"
],
"word": "бана́льщина"
},
{
"code": "sh",
"lang": "Serbo-Croatian",
"lang_code": "sh",
"sense": "something bland or simplistic",
"tags": [
"Cyrillic",
"feminine"
],
"word": "бана́лно̄ст"
},
{
"code": "sh",
"lang": "Serbo-Croatian",
"lang_code": "sh",
"sense": "something bland or simplistic",
"tags": [
"Cyrillic",
"feminine"
],
"word": "тривија́лно̄ст"
},
{
"code": "sh",
"lang": "Serbo-Croatian",
"lang_code": "sh",
"sense": "something bland or simplistic",
"tags": [
"Roman",
"feminine"
],
"word": "banálnōst"
},
{
"code": "sh",
"lang": "Serbo-Croatian",
"lang_code": "sh",
"sense": "something bland or simplistic",
"tags": [
"Roman",
"feminine"
],
"word": "trivijálnōst"
},
{
"code": "sv",
"lang": "Swedish",
"lang_code": "sv",
"sense": "something bland or simplistic",
"word": "snack"
}
],
"word": "pablum"
}
Download raw JSONL data for pablum meaning in English (11.8kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-10-15 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-10-01 using wiktextract (c8bd62c and a979ada). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.