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Dictionary

Words, grammatical forms and meanings linked to the ontology.

nonnonsense en · NOUN

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *né Proto-Germanic *ne Proto-Indo-European *ís? Proto-Indo-European *h₁óynos Proto-Germanic *ainaz Proto-Germanic *nainaz Proto-West Germanic *nain Old English nān Middle English non ▲ Old English nān Old English nān- Middle English non- English non- ▲ English non- Proto-Indo-European *sent-der. Proto-Italic *sentiō Latin sentiō Proto-Indo-European *-tus Proto-Italic *-tus Latin -tus Latin sēnsusbor. Proto-Germanic *sinnaz Frankish *sinnbor. Vulgar Latin *sennus Old French sensbor. Middle English sense English sense English nonsense English nonnonsense From non- + nonsense.

Meanings

  1. (alt-of, rare, uncountable) rare spelling of non-nonsense.
    • If you should have forgotten, here comes a remainder: Your idiotic nonsense is idiotic nonsense, and nonnonsense was, by and large, not to be seen from you during the last 10 years. 2014 September 29, Ralf Bader, “Irrational numbers have no representation as decimal fractions.”, in sci.math (Usenet):
    • Rene has played wonderfully a nonnonsense security chief, comic foil to Shirmerman but has also convincingly played a betrayer. 1998 February 16, Daniel Tropea, “DS9's real strength - imho”, in alt.tv.star-trek.ds9 (Usenet):
    • I have picked up this Teach Yourself Astrology by Jeff Mayo. It seems like a good nonnonsense book. 2001 July 13, Deb Shanker, “Vajpayee`s stars brighter: astrologer”, in soc.culture.indian (Usenet):
    • This is a highly technical term that is used by philosophers to talk nonsense, and I didn’t think what he was saying was at all nonsense. But I was not quite sure what kind of nonnonsense it was! 1968, Psychological Issues, volume 6, page 127:
    • A defective sentence like / *Shakespeare writed gooder than Fletcher / has a recoverable unified meaning despite its ungrammaticality (in each case morphotactic to lexical realization errors). / With this reservation, what distinguishes nonsense from nonnonsense? 2001, Richard Gaskin, editor, Grammar in Early Twentieth-Century Philosophy, Routledge, published 2002, →ISBN:
    • > [snip nonsense] / [nonnonsense reinstated] 2002 May 8, Robert Myers, “US-TX-Austin: Senior Software Engineer (19471312)”, in austin.jobs (Usenet):