Other forms: babbles, babbled, babbling
Babble is the sound of many voices at once with no words picked out of it — the wall of noise in a full café, a classroom before the teacher walks in. A stream babbles too, running over stones.
As a verb it means to talk fast and loosely, saying very little: a baby babbles before it has words, and so does a nervous person who cannot stop. It is a judgement, not a description — call what somebody said babble and you are saying it was empty. It takes on and away and about: he babbled on for ten minutes, she babbled away about the traffic. The one fixed picture the word keeps is a babbling brook.
1nounbabbleThe sound of many voices together, with no single word clear.
“The babble of the market carried right up the street.”
synonyms: chatter
2verbspeechTo talk quickly and foolishly, without saying much.
“He babbled about the weather until somebody changed the subject.”
3nouncarriesTalk that carries no real meaning.
“Half the report was management babble.”
4verbsmallOf a small stream — to run over stones with a soft rushing sound.
“A stream babbles all the way down the hill.”
5verbinfantOf a baby: to make sounds like speech that are not yet words.
“At six months he lay in his cot and babbled to the ceiling.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
BABB-le → BUBBLE
Picture a stream running fast over stones and throwing up bubbles — hundreds of them, and every bubble that breaks lets out a tiny voice, until the water sounds like a crowded room.
hooks ontobubble
The oldest form is ba-ba said twice over — a word built by repeating a sound, possibly the noise a baby makes, the same guess that stands behind babe and baby. It looks as though it ought to come from the Tower of Babel. It does not; that likeness is an accident.
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰa-bʰa-
Proto-Germanic
*babalōną — to chatter
Proto-West Germanic
*bablōn
Old English
*bæblian
Middle English
babelen
English, today
babble
Built from
From Middle English babelen, from Old English bæblian, also wæflian (“to talk foolishly”), from Proto-West Germanic bablōn, wablōn, variants of babalōn, from Proto-Germanic babalōną (“to chatter”), from Proto-Indo-European bʰa-bʰa-, perhaps a reduplication of Proto-Indo-European bʰeh₂- (“to say”), or a variant of Proto-Indo-European baba- (“to talk vaguely, mumble”), or a merger of the two, possibly ultimately imitative of the sound/mimicry of infantile sounds (compare babe, baby). Cognate with stq babbelje (“to babble”), West Frisian babbelje (“to babble”), Dutch babbelen (“to babble, chat”), German Low German babbeln (“to babble”), German babbeln (“to babble”), Danish bable, bavle (“to babble”), Swedish babbla (“to babble”), Icelandic babla (“to babble”). Unrelated to Babel.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA