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Allin

babbling

nounadjectiveverbattested in dialogue

a stage in child language acquisition, during which an infant appears to be experimenting with uttering sounds of language, but not yet producing any recognizable words

noun

  1. 1

    a stage in child language acquisition, during which an infant appears to be experimenting with uttering sounds of language, but not yet producing any recognizable words

  2. 2

    sounds produced by infant during the babbling period

  3. 3

    Idle senseless talk; prattle.

  4. 4

    A confused murmur, as of a stream.

Etymology

From Middle English bablyng, babelynge, equivalent to babble + -ing.

adjective

  1. 1

    That babbles.

Etymology

From Middle English bablyng, babelynge, babelinde, equivalent to babble + -ing.

verb

  1. 1

    Also a form of babblepresent participle and gerund of babble

Forms

plural
babblings
comparative
more babbling
superlative
most babbling
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).