''farrago'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260723122144-00-⌔

farrago - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

farrago (plural farragos or farragoes)

• A collection containing a confused variety of miscellaneous things.
  • ✤ Synonyms: hodgepodge, melange, mingle-mangle; see also Thesaurus: hodgepodge
  • ✤ Yet do I carry every vvhere vvith me ſuch a confounded farago of doubts, fears, hopes, vviſhes, and all the flimſy furniture of a country Miſs’s brain!¹
  • ✤ Back in Paris, where all men adrift naturally float, he succeeded in publishing a fantastic novel, “Sortie d’un Rêve,” a farrago of all that is most foolish in the earlier romantic authors, with here and there a racy turn—“a personal note,” M. Zola would say.²
  • ✤ Balfe’s next work, ‘The Maid of Artois,’ was written to a libretto furnished by Bunn, the first of those astonishing farragoes of balderdash which raised the Drury Lane manager to the first rank amongst poetasters.³
  • ✤ Hastily adapted by slovenly hacks, their librettos (often witty in the original) became incredible farragos of metreless doggrel and punning ineptitude.⁴
  • ✤ Or, This is a farrago of absurdity, I could never feel anything of the sort myself.⁵
  • ✤ The original script is a complicated farrago of intertwined greed and lust, with marriages being planned and hearts being broken in order to accumulate fortunes as well as romance.⁶
  • ✤ It has been pointed out in this space before that a number of the titles you’ll find shelved under self-help in your local bookshop are, on closer examination, farragos of wooden-headed tripe, written by mountebanks and halfwits.⁷
  • ✤ And this is where the larger problem lies: when states try to enforce impossible bans, everyone loses. 3D printing farragoes have all the hallmarks of the absolute worst kind of ineffectual ban: one which encourages overly draconian laws that carry huge side effects, and that ultimately to have little to no effect.⁸
  • ✤ The farrago may have deprived Farage of a fancy bank account, but Alison Rose, chief executive of Coutts’ less exclusive owner, NatWest, gave him something much more valuable: the moral high ground.⁹

Etymology

Borrowed from Latin farrāgō (“mixed fodder; mixture, hodgepodge”), from far (“emmer (a kind of wheat), coarse meal, grits”). Doublet of farro.

Pronunciation

• IPA: /fəˈɹeɪɡoʊ/, /fəˈɹɑːɡoʊ/
  • Audio (Southern England): 🔊

Printed 2026-07-23.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

1. 1775 January 17 (first performance), [Richard Brinsley Sheridan], The Rivals, a Comedy. […], London: […] John Wilkie, […], published 1775, →OCLC, Act II, scene i, page 20: ↩

2. 1885 July, “A Forgotten Pamphleteer”, in Tinsleys’ Magazine, volume 37, London: Tinsley Brothers, page 84: ↩

3. a. 1900, William Barclay Squire, “Balfe, Michael William”, in Dictionary of National Biography, volume 3: ↩

4. 1911, “Drama, 11f: Modern English Drama”, in Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition: ↩

5. 1929 September, Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, uniform edition, London: Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, […], published 1931 (April 1935 printing), →OCLC, page 72: ↩

6. 2005 November 7, Toronto Star: ↩

7. 2007 June 15, Oliver Burkeman, “The rise of the anti-self-help movement”, in The Guardian ‎${}^{[1]}$: ↩

8. 2013 May 10, James Ball, “US government attempts to stifle 3D-printer gun designs will ultimately fail”, in The Guardian ‎${}^{[2]}$: ↩

9. 2023 December 31, Jasper Jolly, “A Farage farrago, crypto crime and rivers of cash: the 2023 Observer business awards”, in The Guardian ‎${}^{[3]}$: ↩