Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun corrupt characters or letters, especially from display or transfer through an inappropriate character set or encoding, e.g., •¶Žš‰»‚¯, which is a corruption of 文字化け.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

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

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Examples

  • Right now, its all good for us, no more mojibake which is the main thing.

    TWiki.Codev 2008

  • You should be able to read the mojibake in my comment above if your browser lets you force it to display as UTF-8 - I had to do it that way to include a schwa.

    languagehat.com: UNIVERSAL CONJUGATOR. 2005

  • Though the Japanese term 文字化け, mojibake, is probably more familiar to English speakers.

    languagehat.com: TOM & JERRY IN CHINESE. 2004

  • Not far into the project we noticed a familiar foe - mojibake, the phenomenon when malformed characters appear when the computer or application fails to render the characters due to encoding issues.

    Development Seed - Technological Solutions for Progressive Organizations 2009

  • Chances are you'll end up with mojibake all over the place at some point.

    Planet TW 2008

  • Chances are you'll end up with mojibake all over the place at some point.

    Planet TW 2008

  • We use UTF-8 for all new apps we write, and we don't get any of the problems we used to get with mojibake (literally in Japanese, a string of unintelligible characters).

    TWiki.Codev 2008

Comments

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  • An incorrect, unreadable sequence of characters that appears when computer software fails to render text correctly according to its associated character encoding.

    æ–‡å—化ã.

    June 6, 2010

  • What's the origin? Is it similar to cupertino?

    January 1, 2013

  • Cf. clbuttic mistake, and especially the examples given for clbuttic, which see, ruzuzu.

    January 1, 2013