verbiage
noun
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Verbiage descends from French verbier, meaning "to trill" or "to warble." The usual sense of the word implies an overabundance of possibly unnecessary words, much like the word wordiness. In other words, a writer with a fondness for verbiage might be accused of "wordiness." Some people think the phrase "excess verbiage" is redundant, but that's not necessarily true. Verbiage has a second sense meaning, simply, "wording," with no suggestion of excess. This second definition has sometimes been treated as an error by people who insist that verbiage must always imply excessiveness, but that sense is well-established and can be considered standard.
Synonyms
Examples of verbiage in a Sentence
Charles McGrath, New York Times Book Review, 13 Aug. 2006
Fashionable courtiers in the Renaissance adopted the doublet. … The cotton padding of this jacket, called bombast (the source of the term for inflated verbiage), was gradually increased to give courtiers the pumped-up look.
—John Tierney, New York Times, 21 Jan. 1999
To find the height of arcane verbiage look no farther than Rule 10 of the rules governing Major League Baseball, in what is known as the Blue Book. The corresponding entry explains the waivers system—the procedures that pertain to certain player transactions—in a way that makes the Magna Carta look like part of the Jackie Collins oeuvre.
—Tom Verducci, Sports Illustrated, 25 Aug. 1997
Sure, some contract verbiage is so objectionable, it can be considered against public policy; in fact, the most arduous hold-harmless clauses would probably be thrown out of court.
—Leon H. Ciesla, Plane & Pilot, March 1995
Is word processing truly the wonder it seems or will it turn out to be but a mere exercise in verbose verbiage?
—Erik Sandberg-Diment, New York Times, 26 June 1984
The editor removed some of the excess verbiage from the article.
teachers loathe the verbiage that students resort to in order to pad a paper
Cheryl Robinson, Forbes, 24 Feb. 2024
Trillin would never reach for such off-the-shelf and impolite verbiage.
—Dwight Garner, New York Times, 22 Jan. 2024
For places formally designated as refugee camps, avoid the clunky refugee camp verbiage in a dateline.
—WSJ, 28 Dec. 2023
When the King’s Crest is decreed, all of the case backs in Bremont’s Armed Forces collection moving forward will have the proper verbiage.
—Roberta Naas, Forbes, 16 Mar. 2023
Despite its ability to mimic human verbiage, ChatGPT was trained to do a straightforward job: use probability and training data to predict the next text that follows a sequence of words.
—Stephen Ornes, Discover Magazine, 21 Dec. 2023
Advertisement Among his other innovations, Lang came up with the idea to put marketing verbiage on the protective lap mats given to drive-through guests.
—Daniel Miller, Los Angeles Times, 1 Dec. 2023
In both states, judges took the constitutional verbiage for its plain meaning.
—Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 28 Mar. 2023
Yet even the oddest succinctly capture an idea that otherwise calls for quite a lot of verbiage.
—Henry Hitchings, WSJ, 16 Nov. 2023
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'verbiage.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Dictionary Entries Near verbiage
Cite this Entry
“Verbiage.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/verbiage. Accessed 19 Apr. 2024.
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