chaos

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. A condition or place of great disorder or confusion.
2. n. A disorderly mass; a jumble: The desk was a chaos of papers and unopened letters.
3. n. The disordered state of unformed matter and infinite space supposed in some cosmogonic views to have existed before the ordered universe.
4. n. Mathematics A dynamical system that has a sensitive dependence on its initial conditions.
5. n. Obsolete An abyss; a chasm.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. A vacant space or chasm; empty, immeasurable space.
2. n. The confused or formless elementary state, not fully existing, in which the universe is supposed to have been latent before the order, uniformities, or laws of nature had been developed or created: the opposite of cosmos.
3. n. A confused mixture of parts or elements; confusion; disorder.
4. n. In the language of the alchemists, the atmosphere: first so used by Paracelsus. Synonyms Anarchy, Chaos. See anarchy.
5. n. [capitalized] The void of unformed matter personified and deemed by some among the Greeks as the oldest of the gods.

Wiktionary

1. n. obsolete A vast chasm or abyss.
2. n. The unordered state of matter in classical accounts of cosmogony
3. n. Any state of disorder, any confused or amorphous mixture or conglomeration.
4. n. obsolete, rare A given medium; a space in which something exists or lives; an environment.
5. n. mathematics Behaviour of iterative non-linear systems in which arbitrarily small variations in initial conditions become magnified over time.
6. n. fantasy One of the two metaphysical forces of the world in some fantasy settings, as opposed to law.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. Archaic An empty, immeasurable space; a yawning chasm.
2. n. The confused, unorganized condition or mass of matter before the creation of distinct and orderly forms.
3. n. Any confused or disordered collection or state of things; a confused mixture; confusion; disorder.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. (Greek mythology) the most ancient of gods; the personification of the infinity of space preceding creation of the universe
2. n. the formless and disordered state of matter before the creation of the cosmos
3. n. a state of extreme confusion and disorder
4. n. (physics) a dynamical system that is extremely sensitive to its initial conditions