mojibake

English
WOTD – 11 February 2024

Etymology
Mojibake in the text of the Japanese Wikipedia when displayed with the wrong encoding.

Borrowed from Japanese 文字化け (mojibake), from 文字 (moji, “character”) + 化ける (bakeru, “to transform, take a different form”, generally in a negative way).

Pronunciation
  • (Received Pronunciation) IPA(key): /ˌməʊd͡ʒiˈbɑːki/, /-keɪ/
  • Audio (Southern England)(file)
  • (General American) IPA(key): /ˌmoʊd͡ʒiˈbɑki/, /-keɪ/
  • Hyphenation: mo‧ji‧ba‧ke

Noun

mojibake (uncountable)

Example

The Japanese term 文字化け, when displayed using the wrong character set or encoding, results in the following mojibake: •¶Žš‰»‚¯.

  1. (computing) Corrupt characters or letters, especially resulting from being displayed or transferred through an inappropriate character set or encoding.
    • 2012, Tom Christiansen, brian d foy, Larry Wall, Jon Orwant, Programming Perl, O'Reilly, →ISBN, page 285:
      Alas, you'll even see “text” files where some lines have one encoding but other lines have different encodings. You are guaranteed to see mojibake.
    • 2021, Lydia Chen, When the Flowers Withered‎, Singapore: Partridge Publishing, →ISBN:
      The space behind the door is filled with mojibake, more specifically, a mojibake that is made of pieces of my memory. “Why? Why do I like girls?” I hear a younger voice of mine echoing in the room.

Translations

Further reading

Japanese

Romanization

mojibake

  1. Rōmaji transcription of もじばけ
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