Word.ws English Dictionary

cryptobabble

cryptobabble noun: communication that is in code or encrypted, and therefore not comprehensible.

Noun

cryptobabble (uncountable)

  1. Communication that is in code or encrypted, and therefore not comprehensible.
    • Just knowing that he has heard cryptobabble is enough to bring teams of assassins to Switzerland to silence the November Man, who had sworn off spywork to please Rita Macklin, his live-in lover.1986, Kirkus Reviews, page 1467
    • Cryptobabble: How Encryption Export Disputes Are Shaping Free Speech for the New Millennium1998, The North Carolina Journal of International Law and Commercial Regilation
  2. Technical jargon or pseudolanguage that seems incomprehensible.
    • If the abbreviations begin to look like typical database cryptobabble, you needn’t bother with them, if you don’t mind typing in full sentences, which do approximate the mother tongue rather closely.1984 December 24, Henry F. Beechhold, “Condor Jr.: This file manager proves you can be good without being complicated”, in InfoWorld, volume 6, number 52, page 41
    • I've noticed that a certain biostatistician that I occasionally work with always talks in similar cryptobabble with me.1991 October 30, Stephen Modena, “ask for help”, in bionet.biology.computational (Usenet)

Examples of cryptobabble in a sentence

  • The other day, this jackass cryptographer who sits next to me at work f-sound what looked like a p-p-password in an old Gmail message, mixed in with a bunch of cryptobabble.2016, Michael Byrnes, Bounty, Ballantine Books, →ISBN, →LCCN, page 348:
  • His mathbabble is as bad as his cryptobabble.2017 June 6, FromTheRafters, “VeeCrypt Encryption Scheme - Cryptanalysis.”, in sci.crypt (Usenet):
  • Now, this may look like meaningless cryptobabble, but it is in fact very funny to adolescent geeks.1995, Aaron Weiss, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Protecting Yourself on the Internet, Que, page 244:
  • The cryptobabble is four times as long as the message itself!1997 April 9, Christopher Gray, “Browser Offsets in Netscape”, in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html (Usenet):

Origin of cryptobabble

From crypto- + babble.

Questions about cryptobabble

What does cryptobabble mean?
Cryptobabble means communication that is in code or encrypted, and therefore not comprehensible.
How do you use cryptobabble in a sentence?
The other day, this jackass cryptographer who sits next to me at work f-sound what looked like a p-p-password in an old Gmail message, mixed in with a bunch of cryptobabble.
What part of speech is cryptobabble?
Cryptobabble is a noun.

Words near cryptobabble in the dictionary

  1. cryptoanalytical
  2. cryptoanarchy
  3. cryptoaperturate
  4. cryptoasset
  5. cryptoassets
  6. cryptobabble
  7. cryptobasidiaceous
  8. cryptobenthic
  9. cryptobillionaire
  10. cryptobillionaires
  11. cryptobiont

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cryptobabble (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.

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