mojibake

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).

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˌməʊd͡ʒiˈbɑːki/, /-keɪ/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˌmoʊd͡ʒiˈbɑki/, /-keɪ/
• Hyphenation: mo‧ji‧ba‧ke

mojibake (uncountable)

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^[1], 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.

• emoji

• mojibake on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

mojibake

1. Rōmaji transcription of もじばけ