fnord
/fnɔːrd/noun, interjection
fnord is a noun meaning “A metasyntactic variable, similar to foo and bar” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled F-N-O-R-D, and it appears about once in every 91 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of fnord is fnords.
What does fnord mean?
noun
- 1
A metasyntactic variable, similar to foo and bar.
interjection
- 1
A word (which may or may not be "fnord" itself) commonly held to be invisible to the conscious mind, but subliminally causing a sense of unease or sudden anger when encountered. So used in the Illuminatus! trilogy.
- 2
A word defined as having no definition.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce fnord?
- /fnɔːrd/
- /fəˈnɔɹd/
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Persent101-fnord.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of fnord
- fnords plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is fnord?
Fnord appears about once in every 91 million words in written English, the 305,310th most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Where does fnord come from?
A neologism from the Principia Discordia popularized in the Illuminatus! trilogy.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).