pell-mell •
\pel-MEL\ • adverb 1 : in mingled
confusion or disorder 2 : in confused haste
Examples: After the
final bell of the day rang, the pupils bolted from their desks and
ran
pell-mell out the door into the schoolyard.
"So Congress has
been racing pell-mell this month to fix this crisis that’s been simmering for
two decades. And what they’ve come up with is a Rube Goldberg contraption even
by their usual convoluted standards." — Danny Westneat, Walla Walla
Union-Bulletin (Washington),
July
18, 2014
Did you know? The word
pell-mell was probably formed through a process called reduplication.
The process—which
involves the repetition of a word or part of a word, often including a slight
change in its pronunciation—also generated such terms as bowwow,
helter-skelter, flip-flop, and chitchat. Yet another product of reduplication
is shilly-shally, which started out as a single-word compression of the
question "Shall I?" For pell-mell, the process is believed to have
occurred long ago: our word traces to a Middle French word of the same meaning,
pelemele, which was likely a product of reduplication from Old French mesle, a form of mesler, meaning "to mix."
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