Word.ws English Dictionary

rumble-bumble

rumble-bumble noun: blather; worthless talk or ideas.

Noun

rumble-bumble (uncountable)

  1. (dated) Blather; worthless talk or ideas.
    • How pleasant it is to turn from all the rumble-bumble about a great man to the great man himself, and this is especially the case with Thomas Hardy. It is like turning from the department-store counter where they sell rose-water, passing through a door and suddenly finding oneself amid the silence...1927, Canadian Bookman, volumes 9-10, page 265
    • Of late the professors of semantics have divided into two factions. The first, led by metaphysicians, lifts the elemental business of communicating ideas to the level of a baffling and somewhat sinister arcanum standing midway between the geometry of the fourth dimension and the Freudian...1945, Henry Louis Mencken, The American Language, page 102

Questions about rumble-bumble

What does rumble-bumble mean?
Rumble-bumble means blather; worthless talk or ideas.
What part of speech is rumble-bumble?
Rumble-bumble is a noun.

Words near rumble-bumble in the dictionary

  1. rumble on
  2. rumble seat
  3. rumble seats
  4. rumble strip
  5. rumble strips
  6. rumble-bumble
  7. rumble-tumble
  8. rumble-tumbles
  9. rumbled
  10. rumbled eggs
  11. rumbled on

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rumble-bumble (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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