bunkum
Syllables: bunk·um/ˈbʌŋkəm/
bunkum noun: senseless talk; nonsense; a piece of nonsense.
Noun
bunkum (countable and uncountable, plural bunkums)
- Senseless talk; nonsense; a piece of nonsense.
- […] the manifold and serpentine wiles and evasions, shufflings and fencings, deceits and dissimulations, he had practised —the bunkums and the quackeries, […]1925, Eden Phillpotts, Circé's Island: And The Girl & the Faun, page 122
- The part of that word to focus on is bunk, short for bunkum, which is what these types attack with vigor and all the obsessiveness of the bunkum spreaders themselves.2005 December 25, Michael Sokolove, “The Debunker”, in The New York Times Magazine
- Synonyms:
- absurdity, all my eye, all my eye and Betty Martin, apple grease, applesauce, bafflegab, balderdash, balls, baloney, banana oil
- Bombastic political posturing or oratorical display designed only for show or public applause.
- Synonyms:
- grandstanding
bunkum meaning in Tamil, Urdu and Malayalam
bunkum in Tamil
- புரட்டுரை
bunkum in Urdu
- بکواس, ڈھکوسلا, خودنمائی
bunkum in Malayalam
- nonsense, gibberish, rubbish
- അസംബന്ധഭാഷണം, അസംബന്ധം, ശുദ്ധഅസംബന്ധം, അപാർത്ഥം, അർത്ഥമില്ലാത്തത്, ചവറ്
Synonyms of bunkum
- absurdity
- all my eye
- all my eye and Betty Martin
- bafflegab
- balderdash
- balls
- baloney
- Bandini
- baragouin
- batcrap
30 more synonymsFewer synonyms
Forms of bunkum
| plural | bunkums |
|---|---|
| alternative form | buncombe |
Origin of bunkum
From buncombe, from “speaking to (or for) Buncombe County, North Carolina”, a county in North Carolina named for Edward Buncombe. In 1820, Felix Walker, who represented the county in the U.S. House of Representatives, rose to address the question of admitting Missouri as a free or slave state, his first attempt to speak on the subject after nearly a month of solid debate, right before the vote was to be called. To the exasperation of colleagues, he began a long and wearisome speech, explaining that he was speaking not to Congress but "to Buncombe." He was ultimately shouted down by his colleagues, though his speech was published in a Washington paper and his persistence made "buncombe" (later respelled "bunkum") a synonym for meaningless political claptrap and later for any kind of nonsense, at first only in the jargon of Washington and then in common usage.
Words formed from bunkum
Questions about bunkum
- What does bunkum mean?
- Bunkum means senseless talk; nonsense; a piece of nonsense.
- What is bunkum in Tamil?
- Bunkum in Tamil is புரட்டுரை. See Bunkum meaning in Tamil.
- What part of speech is bunkum?
- Bunkum is a noun.
- How do you pronounce bunkum?
- Bunkum is pronounced /ˈbʌŋkəm/.
- What is the plural of bunkum?
- The plural of bunkum is bunkums.
Words near bunkum in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: bunkum (page history and authors); bunkum (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); bunkum (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); bunkum (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license). 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.
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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-bunkum.wav.
Cite this entry: “bunkum.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bunkum. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.