Trending: ‘logorrhea’

Logorrhea jumped to the top of our lookups on September 29, 2020, after Rachel Maddow used the word to describe the presidential debates that had recently occurred.

"A monstrous unintelligible display of logorrhea that has nothing to do with any idea of civic discourse..." Rachel Maddow on the President.

— @petersagal.bsky.social (@petersagal) September 30, 2020

We define logorrhea as “excessive and often incoherent talkativeness or wordiness.”

Logorrhea was created in English in the late 1800s from the Greek words logos, meaning "word," "reason," "speech" and -rrhea, from the verb that means "to flow." It's pronounced \log-uh-REE-ah\.

It was probably modeled on the much more familiar word diarrhea, which comes from Greek words combining to mean "to flow through."

Many of our exchanges have the “crisp” sentence and paragraph fever bad. Gentlemen, brevity may be the soul of wit, but brevity is not wit, per se. There must be a well defined thought, then the less drapery and verbiage the better, but the thought must be clearly expressed. A very few have chronic logorrhea.
— Galveston Daily News (Houston, TX), 30 Dec. 1885