hotchpotch
pronunciation
How to pronounce hotchpotch in British English:
UK [ˈhɒtʃpɒtʃ]
How to pronounce hotchpotch in American English:
US [ˈhɑtʃpɑtʃ]
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- Noun:
- a motley assortment of things
- a stew (or thick soup) made with meat and vegetables
Word Origin
- hotchpotch
- hotchpotch: [15] Hotchpotch is an alteration (for the sake of the rhyme) of an earlier hotchpot. This was borrowed from an Old French compound made up of hocher ‘shake’ (perhaps from Frankish hottisōn) and pot ‘pot’. So originally the word meant literally ‘shake the pot’ – presumably to blend an assortment of ingredients, although it is not certain that the allusion was in the first instance culinary. (Old French hocher, incidentally, may well have been the source of the Scottish verb hotch ‘shake, fidget’ [14].)
Example
- 1. The genetic material in them is indeed a hotchpotch derived from avian , human and swine sources , but all eight segments come most recently from pigs .
- 2. I have never understood why anyone would want to swap a delicious pat of butter churned from milk for a manufactured hotchpotch of oils , artificially hardened to create margarine .
- 3. Because swine are natural mixing vessels for influenza strains from different species ( hence the hotchpotch found by dr garten and her colleagues ) , the fear is that a deadlier form could emerge and jump back into humans .