Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun An assortment or a medley; a conglomeration.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A mass composed of various materials confusedly mixed; a medley; a hodgepodge.
  • noun Synonyms See mixture.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A mass composed of various materials confusedly mixed; a medley; a mixture.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A collection containing a confused variety of miscellaneous things.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a motley assortment of things

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Latin farrāgō, mixed fodder, hodgepodge, from far, farr-, a kind of grain; see bhares- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin farrāgo ("mixed fodder; mixture, hodgepodge"), from far ("spelt (a kind of wheat), coarse meal, grits").

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word farrago.

Examples

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • Wordie.org is a farrago of logophiles' farragoes.

    October 10, 2008

  • Foote's farrago was composed by Samuel Foote in 1755 to test the memory of the actor Charles Macklin, who had claimed he could read any paragraph once through and then recite it verbatim. What Foote demonstrated was the way in which we expect language to make sense and to be coherent. When our expectations are confounded as much as they are here, the text becomes impossible to memorise.

    So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf to make an apple-pie; and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street, pops its head into the shop. "What! No soap?" So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber; and there were present the Picninnies, and the Joblillies, and the Garyalies, and the grand Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top, and they all fell to playing the game of catch-as-catch-can till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots.

    December 5, 2008

  • Two of the guests were motionless, catatonic, and another was making faces and blathering, a farrago which sounded like schizophrenic "word salad."

    Oliver Sacks, On the Move (New York: Knopf, 2015)

    December 26, 2015