Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The specialized language of a trade, profession, or similar group, especially when viewed as difficult to understand by outsiders.
  • noun Nonsensical or incoherent language.
  • noun A hybrid language or dialect; a pidgin. Not in technical use.
  • intransitive verb To speak in or use jargon.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A colorless, yellowish, or smoky variety of the mineral zircon from Ceylon.
  • To utter unintelligible sounds.
  • noun Confused, unintelligible talk; irregular, formless speech or language; gabble; gibberish; babble.
  • noun Specifically A barbarous mixed speech, without literary monuments; a rude language resulting from the mixture of two or more discordant languages, especially of a cultivated language with a barbarous one: as, the Chinook jargon; the jargon called Pidgin-English.
  • noun Any phraseology peculiar to a sect, profession, trade, art, or science; professional slang or cant.
  • noun Synonyms Chatter, Babble, etc. See prattle, n.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun Confused, unintelligible language; gibberish.
  • noun an artificial idiom or dialect; cant language; slang.
  • intransitive verb To utter jargon; to emit confused or unintelligible sounds; to talk unintelligibly, or in a harsh and noisy manner.
  • noun (Min.) A variety of zircon. See zircon.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun uncountable A technical terminology unique to a particular subject.
  • noun countable Language characteristic of a particular group.
  • noun uncountable Speech or language that is incomprehensible or unintelligible; gibberish.
  • noun A variety of zircon

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a colorless (or pale yellow or smoky) variety of zircon
  • noun specialized technical terminology characteristic of a particular subject
  • noun a characteristic language of a particular group (as among thieves)

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English jargoun, from Old French jargon, probably of imitative origin.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Old French jargon ("chatter, talk, language")

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

French, from Italian giargone, from Persian زر گون (zar gun, "gold-colored").

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