Shambolic
[sham-BOL-ik]
Part of speech: adjective
Origin: English, mid-20th century
1.
Chaotic, disorganized, or mismanaged.
Examples of Shambolic in a sentence
"The play was a disaster and closed after a single shambolic performance."
"The new CEO brought in an auditing team to make sense of the shambolic records kept under her predecessor."
About Shambolic
“Shambolic” is based on the word “shambles,” meaning “great disorder,” with the suffix “-olic” possibly borrowed from “symbolic.”
Did you Know?
The term “shambolic” has been in use since the early 1950s, though in the 1980s, William Safire noted in his “New York Times” column “On Language” that it was a slang term popular among “our British cousins.” The first citation of the term in the Oxford English Dictionary dates to an issue of “The Times of London” in 1970, but the term took off among English speakers worldwide in the 2010s, reaching the peak of its use on both sides of the Atlantic around 2018.
