The deliberate rendering of something unclear or confusing; in academic writing it may reflect genuine conceptual complexity, or serve as a rhetorical defence — dense technical language used to shield a weak argument from scrutiny.
Obfuscation has two established senses a reader should not confuse. In computing and privacy it is the deliberate degradation of intelligibility as a protective measure — transforming code so its logic resists reading, or adding noise to data so a signal is harder to isolate. In rhetoric and ordinary usage it is the use of language to make something harder to understand, usually to evade scrutiny, and it is a criticism rather than a technique. The senses share an ancestor but have different criteria for success: the first can be engineered and evaluated, the second is a judgement about intent. Particular obfuscation techniques have technical literatures; the word covering them does not.
Why this entry carries no source list. This lexicon cites an official primary source wherever one exists, and says so plainly where none does. No body governs this term. There is no standards organisation for it, no register, and no text whose authors could claim to have settled its meaning. Methods literature describes practice and argues about it; a citation to one author would dress a position in a live argument as a rule, which would mislead more than silence does. What follows is the convention as it is actually used, with the disagreements named rather than smoothed over.