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Kafkaesque.

Marked by a senseless, disorienting, often menacing complexity.

10 characters3 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

adj/ˌkæfkəˈʔɛsk/Received-Pronunciation/ˌkæfkəˈɹɛsk/Received-Pronunciation/ˌkæfkəˈɛsk/Received-Pronunciation/ˌkɑfkəˈʔɛsk/General-American
  1. Marked by a senseless, disorienting, often menacing complexity.

    Kafkaesque bureaucracies
  2. Marked by surreal distortion and often a sense of looming danger.

  3. In the manner of something written by Franz Kafka.

Where this word comes from

Etymology tree English Kafka Proto-Indo-European *-iskos Proto-Germanic *-iskaz Proto-West Germanic *-iskbor. Vulgar Latin -iscus Italian -escobor. French -esquebor. English -esque English Kafkaesque From Kafka + -esque, after writer Franz Kafka. Piecewise doublet of Kafkaish.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.