Some words survive because they are precise. Some because they are useful. And some seem to survive partly because saying them is an event. This page celebrates the last group without inventing tidy etymologies where the evidence is messy.
Nonsense; something considered absurd or untrue.
The bulky sound makes codswallop feel as comic as the claim it dismisses.
The true origin is uncertain. A popular story links it to Hiram Codd's bottle and 'wallop' for beer, but evidence for that neat tale is weak.
Treat the Codd-bottle explanation as folklore.
A frivolous, flighty or excessively talkative person.
Its rapid alternating sounds give it the fluttery energy of the person it describes.
Forms occur in Middle English and later literature, historically linked with chattering, gossip and even demon names in literary tradition.
The word's associations changed substantially across centuries.
A foolish or silly person.
An insult with soft edges: its elaborate sound makes the speaker sound almost as comic as the target.
The origin is uncertain; attempts to derive it confidently from Latin legal phrases are speculative.
Its obscure ancestry is part of the charm.
Pompous, complicated or unintelligible language.
Especially good for official prose that accumulates jargon until the point disappears.
Coined in the 1940s by US politician Maury Maverick, who compared bureaucratic language with turkeys gobbling.
An unusually well-documented modern coinage.
A loud fuss, disturbance or excited commotion.
The rolling repetition makes the noise sound theatrical rather than dangerous.
Developed from older noisy/exclamatory forms such as halloo; exact formation is not fully certain.
It belongs to a family of sound-symbolic uproar words.
Confuse, trick or deceive someone.
Bamboozle feels more ingenious than sinister, making it ideal for puzzles and harmless tricks.
It appeared in English around 1700; deeper origin remains uncertain.
Contemporary complaints show it sounded fashionable and odd even when new.
Meaningless talk, nonsense or insincere fuss.
A useful word for puncturing elaborate sales talk, excuses or ceremonial noise.
Recorded in twentieth-century American slang; deeper origin is uncertain.
Several colourful proposed origins lack firm evidence.
Mischievous, secretive or questionable activity.
The plural can range from harmless antics to suspicious manipulation, with context deciding the seriousness.
Nineteenth-century American slang of uncertain origin, with several proposed language connections.
No single route is definitive.
A noisy reaction, fuss or public uproar.
Brouhaha often implies that the volume of reaction exceeds the size of the triggering event.
Borrowed from French brouhaha, a noise/exclamation word for uproar.
Its sound continues to mimic crowd commotion.
Kiss, cuddle or behave amorously.
A coy, comic word for affectionate or romantic behaviour without explicit description.
Nineteenth-century slang of uncertain origin.
Its silly sound helped it survive as a euphemism.
Dawdle, idle or waste time.
Lollygag turns procrastination into cheerful misbehaviour rather than grim failure.
American nineteenth-century slang; earlier senses may have included romantic fooling around.
Lallygag is an established spelling variant.
Waste time through indecision or dawdling.
The repeated rhythm mimics stop-start hesitation.
A reduplicative formation related to dally, meaning delay or linger.
Repetition intensifies the idea and gives nursery-rhyme energy.
Trivial nonsense, fuss or empty chatter.
An intentionally unserious-sounding dismissal whose echoing syllables make the complaint theatrical.
An old reduplicative expression built for rhythm and contempt.
It illustrates English comic rhyming formations.
Underhand, dishonest or secretive behaviour.
It makes wrongdoing sound like cloak-and-dagger plotting, useful where formal illegality is not being alleged.
Probably altered from Scots sculduddery, which had scandalous/coarse senses.
The modern 'skull' spelling invites false literal readings.
A scruffily dressed or unkempt person, especially in older child descriptions.
Today it can sound affectionate and storybook-like, though historically it could disparage poor or ragged people.
The word has medieval roots and a complex history; Ragamoffyn also appears as a demon name in Middle English material.
Modern warmth should not erase historical class judgement.
A thing whose name is forgotten, unknown or unimportant.
A verbal shrug turned into a noun, keeping conversation moving when precision temporarily fails.
One of several playful placeholder formations built around thing.
It is expressive invention rather than technical borrowing.
An inexperienced, presumptuous or cheeky young person.
A mock-grand insult whose length makes it sound theatrical rather than severe.
Historical forms were used for insignificant or idle young men; whip-snapping imagery may have influenced the form.
The exact semantic steps are more complicated than the modern sound suggests.
Nonsense or foolish talk.
A satisfyingly Victorian-sounding way to reject an idea.
Often traced through Dutch/American Dutch expressions with a coarse literal sense, though details of the route need caution.
Polite folk explanations can hide the likely ruder source.
Pretentious or insincere language designed to attract easy approval.
Originally theatrical: lines or devices that were 'traps' for applause, before the word broadened to empty crowd-pleasing language.
The theatre origin explains why it targets rhetoric designed for reaction rather than substance.
Audience manipulation is an old complaint.
Nonsense, pretence or fraud; also a theatrical expression of cynical dismissal.
Dickens made 'Bah! Humbug!' culturally enduring, but the word was already established.
The eighteenth-century origin is uncertain.
The Christmas association is literary history rather than the source.
Sentimental, contrived or insincere material used for easy effect.
Hokum often targets entertainment that deploys familiar tricks without earning the emotion.
It emerged in American theatrical slang in the early twentieth century; exact formation has competing explanations.
No single colourful derivation is secure.
Senseless, ridiculous or empty talk.
An over-equipped sound for rejecting an idea; earlier senses included a muddled drink.
Historically used for a mixed or adulterated drink before becoming figurative verbal rubbish.
The shift from physical mixture to confused words is a clear metaphorical extension.
A person who talks at length without much sense, or the foolish talk itself.
A wonderfully windy word for windy talk.
Associated with Scots and an old Scottish song before travelling strongly into American English.
Its transatlantic life is more interesting than modern guesses involving literal kites.
Anticlockwise; historically, movement contrary to the sun's apparent path.
Its survival in folklore and fantasy gives an ordinary direction immediate atmosphere.
From Scots/Germanic elements meaning roughly against and direction/course.
Folkloric associations vary; the directional meaning is the secure core.
A shrewd, unprincipled person, especially a politician in historical American use.
Its extravagant sound helped make it a favourite unusual-word specimen.
Nineteenth-century American slang of uncertain origin; political use is well documented.
Precise German-monster derivations are not securely proven.
Confuse, unsettle or throw out of composure.
It looks technical but is humorous pseudo-learned slang, perfect for comic bewilderment.
An American nineteenth-century fanciful formation made to resemble grand Latinate vocabulary.
Its over-engineered shape is part of the joke.
Confuse or perplex.
A genuine but regional/uncommon American word whose sound gives ordinary confusion comic grandeur.
Recorded in American regional usage; deeper formation is uncertain.
Rare-word websites sometimes overstate how common it is.
Leave abruptly; decamp.
Mock-Latinate American slang: a grandiose verb for simply clearing off.
Coined in a nineteenth-century American fashion for humorous pseudo-classical words.
Its absurd form is the point, not an ancient Latin pedigree.
A nervous or queasy feeling in the stomach.
A comic bodily word for butterflies, nerves or stomach unease.
An alteration of older dialect expressions for abdominal discomfort; links to cholera are not a complete explanation.
The exact formation is less secure than the long-standing stomach association.
Go about from place to place in pursuit of pleasure.
Gallivant makes wandering sound cheerfully irresponsible.
Probably related to gallant and older gallanting senses involving showy or romantic behaviour.
The movement sense developed over time from those social associations.
Very quickly; at full speed.
Its clipped repeated rhythm seems to hurry as it is spoken.
Nineteenth-century American slang; exact expressive formation is playful rather than analytically neat.
Sound pattern is central to its appeal.
An informal gathering, especially one involving folk music; historically also a placeholder word.
The word had several lives before folk-music culture made the social gathering sense famous.
American slang of uncertain origin.
Earlier gadget/placeholder senses make single-story etymologies misleading.
Crooked, askew, diagonal or generally out of alignment.
One of several regional forms, including catawampus, for things that sit at odd angles or are disordered.
Dialectal American history, probably involving cater-/cata- forms associated with diagonal direction plus expressive reshaping.
Multiple spellings are part of the history.
Run away or leave quickly.
A word whose sound seems to make feet disappear before questions arrive.
Rose to prominence in American English during the Civil War; ultimate origin is uncertain.
Historical prominence is firmer than any proposed foreign-language parent.
An umbrella, in playful old-fashioned American slang.
It sounds like improbable machinery, which is why it survives mainly as a comic alternative.
A humorous American formation from the late nineteenth century, probably influenced by umbrella and chute/shoot sounds.
It was playful slang, never a technical term.
Obtain, arrange or manipulate something by clever manoeuvring.
Finagle sits between ingenuity and dishonesty; context decides whether it earns admiration or suspicion.
Twentieth-century American slang of uncertain origin.
Supposed exact sources are debated.
Completely puzzle or bewilder.
A compact comic verb for the moment understanding stops.
A nineteenth-century English word of uncertain, possibly dialectal origin.
Its opaque ancestry appropriately mirrors its meaning.
A confused mixture or jumble of different things.
A richer, older alternative to mishmash with a faint culinary flavour.
Borrowed from French galimafrée, historically a mixed dish or stew, before becoming figurative.
The food-to-mixture metaphor is particularly neat.
In a jumbled, disorderly arrangement.
The tumbling rhyme makes disorder audible.
A centuries-old rhyming reduplicative formation; there is no useful literal pig story behind it.
Sound pattern matters more than word-by-word decomposition.
Busy, noisy activity or confusion.
Literary pedigree combines with physical energy; Shakespeare helped preserve it but did not invent it.
An older rhyming/reduplicative formation connected with tumult and hurling movement.
Literary fame is not the same as coinage.
Suspicious manipulation or underhand manoeuvring.
The phrase implies something has been fiddled with behind the scenes.
Usually traced through Scots joukery-pawkery, connected with trickery.
Its modern spelling makes it sound like nonsense syllables, increasing comic force.
Noisy, meaningless argument or verbose nonsense.
It turns bickering into a sound effect, dismissing both content and self-importance.
A Scots/English reduplicative expression related to argle, meaning argue.
The rhyme performs the back-and-forth of petty dispute.
A person who idly watches activity on canals.
A delightfully specific word for the spectator who stands by a lock simply to watch watery life pass.
An English canal-side word of uncertain origin.
Specialist canal meaning is more secure than speculative deeper etymologies.
A self-important, boastful little person.
The word sounds like the fanfare such a person might imagine follows them into a room.
An old playful formation probably influenced by cock in senses of strutting pride.
Exact historical development is not perfectly simple.
A small object or gadget whose proper name is unknown.
The practical cousin of thingamajig, often suggesting a component or little decorative item.
American colloquial placeholder formation from the early twentieth century.
It belongs to a productive family of nonsense-like substitute names.
A foolish or insignificant person; an old comic insult.
Maximum syllables for a relatively mild accusation.
An early modern English insult combining fop with a disparaging second element.
It is genuinely old vocabulary rather than a modern novelty coinage.
A large knife, or historically a knife-fight.
Its modern sound is surprisingly cheerful for a word with a sharp historical meaning.
Borrowed from Dutch expressions connected with thrusting and cutting, entering English through forms such as snick-or-snee.
The current amusing sound is misleadingly distant from the referent.
A foolish person; a blockhead.
A gloriously disproportionate insult for ordinary foolishness.
An old English comic compound built from ninny plus an expressive second element.
Historical uses show a straightforward insult rather than a technical label.
Cheat, trick or bamboozle.
American frontier-flavoured comic vocabulary for being taken in by a trick.
Nineteenth-century American slang of uncertain origin.
Picturesque cattle-based stories are speculative.
Foolish talk, nonsense or empty sentimental writing.
A word that ridicules nonsense by sounding nonsensical itself.
Nineteenth-century expressive slang; exact origin is uncertain.
It has long punctured inflated rhetoric.
Trivial fuss, nonsense or unnecessary ornament.
Can dismiss verbal nonsense, ceremonial fuss or decorative detail that adds little substance.
Developed from meaningless song refrains such as fol-de-rol, which became a noun for nonsense or frippery.
Musical nonsense syllables became ordinary vocabulary.
Foolish behaviour, silly tricks or harmless misconduct.
More affectionate than misconduct and more organised than simple silliness.
Built from Tom Fool, a traditional generic name for a foolish person, plus -ery.
The generic-person name has older roots in comic tradition.
Hesitate or vacillate.
The repeated sound makes indecision resemble stepping from one foot to the other.
Developed from 'shall I, shall I?' through playful reduplication.
The form enacts the repeated internal question.
A long, complicated and often unnecessary procedure or story.
The perfect word for bureaucracy that acquires forms, steps, explanations and detours.
Developed from 'ragman roll', historically a long roll/list or document, with the form changing dramatically over centuries.
A striking example of sound change obscuring an older phrase.
Something that spins, turns rapidly or changes continually.
The repeated sounds seem to rotate, fitting toys, fairground devices and figurative cycles of fashion or fortune.
An old compound based on whirling movement, with gig historically used for lively or spinning things.
Literal spinning underpins the figurative sense.
An awkward or clumsy adolescent youth.
Captures the ungainly in-between state of someone no longer a child but not confidently adult.
Recorded from the sixteenth century; deeper formation is uncertain and likely expressive.
Its social assumptions are historical.
A vain, showy or conceited person.
The word travelled from parrot to human insult: the bright conspicuous bird became a metaphor for a strutting person.
English forms connect through Old French and medieval words for a parrot, with deeper borrowing history.
The bird-to-boaster bridge is the key semantic story.
A mischievous rogue or rascal.
An extravagantly old-fashioned way to call someone a scoundrel; performance often matters more than accusation.
An alteration of older rascal-related forms reshaped through expressive English usage.
Its history connects to older disparaging vocabulary.
A person or thing whose name cannot be recalled or need not be specified.
The spoken phrase 'what-you-may-call-it' lexicalised into one elastic noun.
A conversational placeholder assembled from an everyday question.
Spelling varies because speech came first.
A confused or disorderly mixture.
Short, rhythmic and useful for collections thrown together with little system.
Related to mash and older reduplicative formations for mixture and confusion.
Repeated sound reinforces the mixing idea.
A miscellaneous mixture of different things.
A hodgepodge can be charming even when it lacks a single organising principle.
An altered form of hotchpotch, historically a mixed dish or stew and later any mixture.
The food-to-mixture metaphor parallels gallimaufry.
In hurried, disorderly confusion.
Its tumbling rhyme suits uncontrolled movement and events without sequence.
A long-established rhyming formation.
Later cultural titles and rides did not create the expression.
Reckless, disorderly or wildly impulsive.
Suggests movement without enough planning, often with comic affection.
An early modern expressive rhyming formation with uncertain literal components.
The energy comes from sound as much as history.
In confused, headlong haste.
A compact literary word for people or things rushing together without order.
Borrowed from French pêle-mêle, meaning in a confused mixture.
The repeating sound survives almost intact from French.
Flashy excitement, showmanship or promotional fuss.
Almost visual: glitter, noise and movement packed into a word.
American expressive slang related to razzle-dazzle-style formations; exact coinage is uncertain.
Its sound-symbolic family is clearer than a single inventor.
Bad-tempered, argumentative and difficult to deal with.
A multi-syllable machine for describing sustained, stubborn grumpiness.
Eighteenth-century English of uncertain origin with several dialect/blend theories.
No single derivation is secure enough to state without qualification.
A habitually grumbling, bad-tempered person.
Modern speakers can use it affectionately for someone who proudly complains about everything.
The origin is famously uncertain; even Samuel Johnson recorded a fanciful proposed derivation.
Its unclear ancestry has generated centuries of speculation.
A person considered old-fashioned, fussy or resistant to change.
The rhyme makes the criticism mild and almost nursery-like.
The exact nineteenth-century American origin is uncertain.
Its reduplicative form gives it comic harmlessness.
A person who goes around socially for pleasure.
A one-word lifestyle: someone forever off visiting, exploring or socialising.
Built from gad about, with gad meaning roam restlessly.
The compound transparently preserves the older verb phrase.
A forgetful, disorganised or easily distracted person.
Pictures thoughts as objects that refuse to stay in one place.
A transparent compound of scatter and brain.
The metaphor, not technical psychology, gives the word its meaning.
A person who frequently drops things.
Imagines fingers made slippery with butter, instantly explaining the clumsiness.
A transparent compound recorded for centuries and common in sport/everyday use.
It is physical metaphor rather than mysterious borrowing.
Upside down, confused or in complete disorder.
A classic comic disorder word that can describe physical inversion or reversed relationships.
An old playful English formation associated with top and overturning ideas.
Exact early formation is complex, but reversal is stable.
Whether one wants to or not; also haphazardly or without planning.
Originally compulsion—roughly 'will he, nill he'—before developing a common unplanned-action sense.
It preserves the obsolete verb nill, meaning not want or be unwilling.
The old grammar makes its history especially illuminating.
Mischievous tricks, antics or playful misbehaviour.
A buoyant plural noun for practical jokes and energetic messing about.
Nineteenth-century American slang, with monkey reinforcing a metaphor of playful antics and shines carrying older slang senses of tricks.
The history is colloquial rather than a literal monkey story.