If you've typed "verbage" in a business email and wondered whether it looked right, you're not alone. The question of verbage vs verbiage trips up careful writers every day, partly because the two strings look so similar and partly because "verbage" sounds plausible. Only one of them is a recognized English word. The answer is verbiage.
What verbiage actually means
Verbiage is a noun that refers to an excess of words: language that's longer, more complicated, or more ornate than the situation calls for. It comes from the French verbiage, itself from verbier (to chatter), which traces back to the Latin verbum, meaning "word."
In professional writing, verbiage almost always carries a critical edge. When someone says "cut the verbiage," they mean: strip out the filler, the throat-clearing, the redundant phrases. It's rarely a compliment. A sentence like "the contract was full of legal verbiage" signals that the language felt padded or obscure, not precise.
Some style guides acknowledge a looser use where verbiage simply means "the wording" or "the language used," without any implied criticism. "Check the verbiage on page 3" can mean nothing more than "look at the wording." That neutral sense is common in American English workplaces. Still, many readers will pick up a critical undertone, so if you mean wording neutrally, "phrasing" or "wording" is safer.
What about "verbage"?
"Verbage" is a misspelling. It doesn't appear in Merriam-Webster, Oxford, or the American Heritage Dictionary. There's no record of it as a legitimate variant. It exists almost entirely as a phonetic error: people hear "ver-bij" and reconstruct it as "ver-bij" on the page, dropping the middle syllable.
The word has three syllables: VER-bee-ij. Writing it out phonetically helps: ver-bi-age. That middle "bi" is where writers go wrong. Once you see the structure, the correct spelling sticks.
Using "verbage" in a professional document is the kind of error that careful readers notice. It signals unfamiliarity with the word itself, which undercuts the point you're making. If you're telling a colleague to simplify the language in a proposal, "please reduce the verbage" hands them an easy comeback.
How to use verbiage correctly in business writing
Verbiage fits naturally in editorial and revision contexts. Here are three sentences showing correct use:
- "The proposal runs to 14 pages because of unnecessary verbiage in the executive summary."
- "Legal has approved the verbiage on the indemnification clause."
- "We need to tighten the verbiage before the deck goes to the client."
Notice that the second example uses the neutral sense. In American workplace English, "the verbiage on the clause" just means "the exact words." That usage is widespread in legal and corporate settings, even if traditionalists prefer "wording."
If you're writing for a British audience, "verbiage" is understood but less common. British English tends to reach for "wording," "phrasing," or "language" instead. For a global audience, one of those neutral alternatives avoids any ambiguity. This is the same kind of audience-awareness that shapes choices like favorite or favourite, where the right form depends on who's reading.
Similar word pairs that cause the same confusion
Verbage/verbiage belongs to a small family of words where a dropped or altered syllable produces a convincing-looking but wrong spelling. "Revelant" for "relevant" works the same way. So does "supposably" for "supposedly." The mechanism is identical: a syllable gets swallowed in speech, and the writer reconstructs the word from sound rather than from memory of its written form.
The fix is simple. When a word looks slightly off, check a dictionary before sending. Spell-checkers like Grammarly catch "verbage" reliably because it returns zero dictionary matches, so automated tools are useful here. What they won't always catch is a correctly spelled word used in the wrong sense, which is a different problem entirely.
The broader lesson: words borrowed from French often retain a spelling that doesn't match their English pronunciation. Verbiage is one. Empathic vs empathetic is a related case where the confusion comes from competing suffixes rather than a borrowed spelling, but the same principle applies: check before you commit.
Quick reference
Verbiage: correct. A real English word meaning an excess of words, or (in neutral use) the specific wording of a text. Three syllables: VER-bee-ij.
Verbage: not a word. A misspelling produced by dropping the middle syllable. Don't use it.
When in doubt, swap in "wording" or "phrasing." Both communicate the neutral sense without any risk of a spelling error, and both read clearly to every audience.