not even wrong
not even wrong adjective: of a supposedly scientific argument or explanation: unable to be meaningfully discussed because it is based on fundamentally invalid reasoning or speculative premises that cannot be proven or falsified.
Adjective
not even wrong (not comparable)
- Of a supposedly scientific argument or explanation: unable to be meaningfully discussed because it is based on fundamentally invalid reasoning or speculative premises that cannot be proven or falsified.
- Your alternate name for “near monopoles” (magnets with one pole appearing much stronger than the other) is bad labwork—labwork so mesmerizingly awful that it flat out is not even wrong.1997, Electronics Now, volume 68, page 7
- Some physicists claim that the dominant research program, designed to overcome this situation, is not really science at all. As Peter Woit (2007) put it, it is not even wrong. If we ignore such critics of the state of physics and accept the mainstream view we are told that nature can only be...2016, Arran Gare, The Philosophical Foundations of Ecological Civilization, page 3
Origin of not even wrong
Generally attributed to theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli.
Questions about not even wrong
- What does not even wrong mean?
- Not even wrong means of a supposedly scientific argument or explanation: unable to be meaningfully discussed because it is based on fundamentally invalid reasoning or speculative premises that cannot be proven or falsified.
- What part of speech is not even wrong?
- Not even wrong is an adjective.
Words near not even wrong in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: not even wrong (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: “not even wrong.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/not_even_wrong. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.