"psychobabble" meaning in English

See psychobabble in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

IPA: /ˈsaɪkəʊbab(ə)l/ [UK]
Etymology: From psycho- + babble. First use appears c. 1975 in an article by R.D. Rosen. See cite below. Etymology templates: {{prefix|en|psycho|babble}} psycho- + babble Head templates: {{en-noun|-}} psychobabble (uncountable)
  1. (somewhat derogatory) The jargon of psychology and psychoanalysis, especially when used pretentiously to discuss mundane issues. Tags: derogatory, uncountable
    Sense id: en-psychobabble-en-noun-Y6rX7o0l Categories (other): Jargon Disambiguation of Jargon: 50 50

Verb

IPA: /ˈsaɪkəʊbab(ə)l/ [UK] Forms: psychobabbles [present, singular, third-person], psychobabbling [participle, present], psychobabbled [participle, past], psychobabbled [past]
Etymology: From psycho- + babble. First use appears c. 1975 in an article by R.D. Rosen. See cite below. Etymology templates: {{prefix|en|psycho|babble}} psycho- + babble Head templates: {{en-verb}} psychobabble (third-person singular simple present psychobabbles, present participle psychobabbling, simple past and past participle psychobabbled)
  1. (intransitive) To speak or converse using this kind of jargon. Tags: intransitive Derived forms: psychobabbler
    Sense id: en-psychobabble-en-verb-80bDHCwJ Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, English terms prefixed with psycho-, Pages with 1 entry, Pages with entries, Jargon Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 34 66 Disambiguation of English terms prefixed with psycho-: 39 61 Disambiguation of Pages with 1 entry: 25 75 Disambiguation of Pages with entries: 18 82 Disambiguation of Jargon: 50 50

Inflected forms

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          "ref": "1977 December 3, “Psychobabble”, in Time:",
          "text": "The psychological patter of the '70s is as inescapable as Muzak and just as numbing: Are you relating? Going through heavy changes? In touch with yourself and doing your own thing? Are you up front, or just hung up and uptight? Boston Writer R.D. (for Richard Dean) Rosen calls it psychobabble, and in his new book by that title (Atheneum, $8.95) sees America awash in soggy therapeutic clichés.",
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Download raw JSONL data for psychobabble meaning in English (3.9kB)


This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-07-20 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-07-01 using wiktextract (45c4a21 and f1c2b61). 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.