Nonsense is a
communication, via
speech,
writing, or any other
symbolic system, that lacks any coherent
meaning. Sometimes in ordinary usage, nonsense is synonymous with
absurdity or
the ridiculous. Many
poets,
novelists and
songwriters have used nonsense in their works, often creating entire works using it for reasons ranging from pure comic amusement or satire, to illustrating a point about language or reasoning. In the philosophy of language and philosophy of science, nonsense is distinguished from
sense or meaningfulness, and attempts have been made to come up with a
coherent and
consistent method of distinguishing sense from nonsense. It is also an important field of study in
cryptography regarding separating a
signal from
noise.