A frivolous, flighty, or excessively talkative person — someone who chatters endlessly about trivial matters.

Dates to at least the fifteenth century, first recorded around 1450 in a form suggesting it was already a familiar term for a garrulous person.

Shakespeare used a form of the word in King Lear, where Edgar, feigning madness, names one of the five fiends possessing him Flibbertigibbet.

Thought to be an extended onomatopoeic formation imitating the rapid, meaningless sound of idle chatter — similar in construction to other reduplicative nonsense words.

In the Lindisfarne Gospels glossary of the ninth century, a form of the word appears as a marginal annotation meaning one who speaks before thinking, making it one of the oldest recorded English insults.