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What does “roezemoes” mean in Dutch?

Roezemoes means the low, murmuring hubbub of a crowd — background chatter, the general noise of a busy room. It is a rhyming compound built on ruisen (“to make a rushing sound”), and the word’s own sound does the work: say it aloud and it already sounds like the blur of overlapping voices it describes. That self-illustrating quality makes it one of the most immediately guessable Dutch words a learner can meet.

In the clip a frustrated teacher shouts “het roezemoes moet stoppen” — the hubbub must stop — as he writes the names of the offenders on the board. The contrast between his sharp words and the soft, buzzing sound of roezemoes itself is hard to miss. The word has been in Dutch since at least the 16th century and turns up wherever there is undifferentiated background noise: het roezemoes van de markt, het roezemoes van een feestzaal. The related verb roezemoezen means to bustle about with low, busy sounds — so the whole word family evokes productive but chaotic noise.