Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun Obsessive repetition of words and phrases, especially as a symptom of mental illness.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun In pathology, the continual utterance of certain words or phrases, repeated at short intervals, without any reference to their meaning.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun An
obsessive repetition ofmeaningless words andphrases , especially as a symptom ofmental illness .
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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Often striking, non-goal-directed, repetitive motor behavior; repetition of phrases and sentences in an automatic fashion, similar to a scratched record, termed verbigeration verbal stereotypy
The Neuropsychiatric Guide to Modern Everyday Psychiatry Michael Alan Taylor 1993
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Schizophrenics frequently speak in a stilted, manneristic fashion, and the fluency of their speech may be intermittently disturbed, with paucity of speech, verbigeration (associations repeated in a stereotyped manner, palilalia in the aphasia literature), or perseveration (words or phrases repetitively inserted in the flow of speech).
The Neuropsychiatric Guide to Modern Everyday Psychiatry Michael Alan Taylor 1993
nickmiller commented on the word verbigeration
Example from a recent meeting: 'the pathway we were on has already been achieved, so I'm mildly confused... the parameters and principles sit beneath that'.
May 7, 2007
qms commented on the word verbigeration
The words in such dull iteration
Are not even tergiversation.
“There was no collusion”
In witless profusion
Is no more than verbigeration.
July 23, 2018