verbiage
noun

- language which is very complicated and which contains a lot of unnecessary words

(Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary)

- the manner in which something is expressed in words (U.S. English)

(The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition)

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WORD ORIGIN

Verbiage (1721) stems from the French verbiage "wordiness", the Middle French verbier "to chatter," the Old French verbe "word" and finally from the Latin verbum "word." This root appears in other Romanic languages: verbositý (Italian), verbosidade (Portuguese), verborrea, verborragia (Spanish).

In British English, verbiage refers to complicated and lengthy language that relies on lots of useless words. Or to put it colloquially, blather, bla bla bla, etc…

In American English, verbiage has two meanings: an older, slightly insulting expression meaning "too many words, wordiness," as in "Her ideas were lost in her verbiage", and a newer, more general definition meaning "words or wording," as in "use concise military verbiage" (a quote from General George Patton). Both senses are standard, but the former use - wordiness - still largely overwhelms the latter sense.

Warning! One might hear or read the word "verbage" from time to time. It is sometimes used as a synonym for verbiage. Despite yielding more than 250,000 Google hits, the word verbage does not exist. According to some sources, verbage is an intentional misspelling of verbiage meant to combine verbiage and garbage, thus giving us a clever word that means "verbal garbage."

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SYNONYMS

chatter, diction, floridity, logorrhea, parlance, redundancy, repetition, talk, verbosity, wordage, wordiness

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Practice OWAD in a conversation:

"Take care to avoid technical VERBIAGE when addressing non-scientific audiences."