Word.ws English Dictionary

brainfuck

brainfuck noun: something that destabilizes, confuses, or manipulates a person's mind. Also the alternative letter-case form of Brainfuck.

Noun

brainfuck (plural brainfucks)

  1. (vulgar) Something that destabilizes, confuses, or manipulates a person's mind.
    • What a brainfuck. Little Roger, my brother, wanted to have a talk about sex.2004, Dana Hodgdon, Adam's Theories, iUniverse, published 2004, →ISBN, page 107

Verb

brainfuck (third-person singular simple present brainfucks, present participle brainfucking, simple past and past participle brainfucked)

  1. (vulgar) To destabilize, confuse, or manipulate a person's mind.
    • "I don't want to hear that. Don't try and brainfuck me by turning this around and making it some sort of redemption thing. […]1999, Boston Teran, God Is a Bullet, Ballantine Books, →ISBN, page 70

Proper noun capitalized: Brainfuck

Brainfuck

  1. A minimalist esoteric programming language, created for amusement, in which every basic machine instruction is represented by a single character.
    • Some eccentric languages are structurally just as simple, but intentionally made awfully hard to understand — like the notorious languages Brainfuck […] or Malbolge.2005, G. Braziller, Inc., edited by Morten Søndergaard, Perttu Rastas, and Björn Norberg, Get real: real time + art + theory + practice + history, →ISBN, page 48
    • Brainfuck is an archetypically minimalist language, providing merely eight commands, each represented by a single character. These commands operate on an array of 30000 byte cells initialized to 0.2008, Matthew Fuller, Software Studies: A Lexicon, →ISBN, page 269

Also used as

brainfuck is also the alternative letter-case form of Brainfuck.

Synonyms of brainfuck

Forms of brainfuck

Noun
pluralbrainfucks
Verb
third-person singular presentbrainfucks
present participlebrainfucking
past participlebrainfucked
pastbrainfucked
Proper noun
alternative formbrainfuck

Origin of brainfuck

From brain + fuck (“to play with; to tinker”).

From brain + fuck, implying that it is confusing to use.

Questions about brainfuck

What does brainfuck mean?
Brainfuck means something that destabilizes, confuses, or manipulates a person's mind.
What part of speech is brainfuck?
Brainfuck can be a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
What is the plural of brainfuck?
The plural of brainfuck is brainfucks.

Words near brainfuck in the dictionary

  1. brainfarts
  2. brainfest
  3. brainfests
  4. brainfood
  5. brainfoods
  6. brainfuck
  7. brainfucked
  8. brainfucking
  9. brainfucks
  10. brainful
  11. brainfuls

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: brainfuck (page history and authors); Brainfuck (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-Brainfuck.wav.

Cite this entry: “brainfuck.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/brainfuck. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.