Word.ws English Dictionary

mojibake

Syllables: mo·ji·ba·ke/ˌməʊd͡ʒiˈbɑːki/US/ˌmoʊd͡ʒiˈbɑki/

mojibake noun: corrupt characters or letters, especially resulting from being displayed or transferred through an inappropriate character set or encoding.

mojibake: corrupt characters or letters, especially resulting from being displayed or transferred through an...
Image: Nameneko, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

mojibake (uncountable)

  1. Corrupt characters or letters, especially resulting from being displayed or transferred through an inappropriate character set or encoding.
    • Alas, you'll even see “text” files where some lines have one encoding but other lines have different encodings. You are guaranteed to see mojibake.2012, Tom Christiansen, brian d foy, Larry Wall, Jon Orwant, Programming Perl, O'Reilly, →ISBN, page 285
    • The space behind the door is filled with mojibake, more specifically, a mojibake that is made of pieces of my memory. “Why? Why do I like girls?” I hear a younger voice of mine echoing in the room.2021, Lydia Chen, When the Flowers Withered, Singapore: Partridge Publishing, →ISBN

mojibake meaning in Arabic, Persian, Thai and Vietnamese

mojibake in Arabic

corrupt characters or letters
مُوجِيبَاكِي mujibākī

mojibake in Persian

corrupt characters or letters
موجیباکه mojibâke

mojibake in Thai

corrupt characters or letters
ภาษาต่างดาว paa-sǎa-dtàang-daao

mojibake in Vietnamese

corrupt characters or letters
loạn mã

Origin of mojibake

Borrowed from Japanese 文字化け (mojibake), from 文字 (moji, “character”) + 化ける (bakeru, “to transform, take a different form”, generally in a negative way).

Questions about mojibake

What does mojibake mean?
Mojibake means corrupt characters or letters, especially resulting from being displayed or transferred through an inappropriate character set or encoding.
What is mojibake in Arabic?
Mojibake in Arabic is مُوجِيبَاكِي (mujibākī). See Mojibake meaning in Arabic.
What part of speech is mojibake?
Mojibake is a noun.
How do you pronounce mojibake?
Mojibake is pronounced /ˌməʊd͡ʒiˈbɑːki/ (UK).

Words near mojibake in the dictionary

  1. Mojave-aster
  2. Mojette transform
  3. Mojette transforms
  4. moji
  5. Moji-ku
  6. mojibake
  7. Mojica
  8. Mojicas
  9. mojis
  10. mojitarita
  11. mojitaritas

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mojibake (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)-Vealhurl-mojibake.wav.

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