rigmarole

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   a long, complicated, and often unnecessary procedure

   Renewing the permit involved the usual bureaucratic rigmarole.

2. 2
   noun

   dated: confused, rambling, or meaningless talk

   The witness launched into a rigmarole that never answered the question.

An alteration of ragman roll, once a long catalog or a roll used in a medieval verse-drawing game. By the eighteenth century rigmarole meant confused or rambling speech; in the nineteenth it broadened to a tedious and unnecessarily complicated procedure.

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