Word.ws English Dictionary

gubbish

gubbish noun: anything worthless or incomprehensible; junk.

Noun

gubbish (uncountable)

  1. Anything worthless or incomprehensible; junk.
    • But by the time the novel is over we are left with the perception that the autistic boy is living in a kind of precog vision of a future decaying into “gubbish,” into a dead simulacrum from which all animating spirit has been leached ( a key Dickian concept ), as real or more so in some sense than...1990, Norman Spinrad, Science Fiction in the Real World, page 208
    • All that kipple, gubbish, garble and abomination which Alice James Raccoona Tiptree Sheldon, Jr., showed for what it is when she appeared, smiling a little uncertainly, from her postbox in McLean, Virginia.1992, Ursula K. Le Guin, Susan Wood, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, page 184

Origin of gubbish

Blend of garbage + rubbish, coined by Philip K. Dick in his 1964 novel Martian Time-Slip.

Questions about gubbish

What does gubbish mean?
Gubbish means anything worthless or incomprehensible; junk.
What part of speech is gubbish?
Gubbish is a noun.

Words near gubbish in the dictionary

  1. Gubbi Gubbi
  2. gubbing
  3. gubbins
  4. Gubbinses
  5. Gubbio
  6. gubbish
  7. guber
  8. gubernacula
  9. gubernacular
  10. gubernaculum
  11. gubernance

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gubbish (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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