nonsense

Meanings

Noun

• Letters or words, in writing or speech, that have no meaning or pattern or seem to have no meaning.
• An untrue statement.
• That which is silly, illogical and lacks any meaning, reason or value; that which does not make sense.
• Something foolish.
• A type of poetry that contains strange or surreal ideas, as, for example, that written by Edward Lear.
• A damaged DNA sequence whose products are not biologically active, that is, that does nothing.

Verb

• To make nonsense of;
• To attempt to dismiss as nonsense; to ignore or belittle the significance of something; to render unimportant or puny.
• To joke around, to waste time

Adjective

• Nonsensical.
• Resulting from the substitution of a nucleotide in a sense codon, causing it to become a stop codon (not coding for an amino-acid).

Origin

• From non- + sense, from c. 1610. Compare the semantically similar West Frisian ûnsin, Dutch onzin, German Unsinn, English unsense.