shamble
pronunciation
How to pronounce shamble in British English:
UK [ˈʃæmbl]
How to pronounce shamble in American English:
US [ˈʃæmbəl]
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- Noun:
- walking with a slow dragging motion without lifting your feet
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- Verb:
- walk by dragging one's feet
Word Origin
- shamble
- shamble: [17] Shamble ‘slouch’ and the noun shambles [15] are probably related. The latter originally meant ‘meat market’. It arose out of the plural of the now obsolete shamble ‘meat stall, meat table’, which represented a semantic specialization of Old English sceamul ‘stool, table’. This was descended from prehistoric Germanic *skamul (source also of German schemel ‘stool’), which in turn was borrowed from Latin scamellum, a diminutive form of scamnum ‘bench’.In the 16th century, the signification of shambles moved on to ‘slaughterhouse’, and hence metaphorically to any ‘scene of bloodshed and slaughter’, but the milder modern sense ‘scene of disorder or ruin’ did not emerge until as recently as the early 20th century. The verb shamble is thought to come from the now obsolete expression shamble legs ‘ungainly legs’, an allusion to the rickety legs of the stalls or tables in meat markets.
- shamble (v.)
- "to walk with a shuffling gait, walk awkwardly and unsteadily," 1680s, from an adjective meaning "ungainly, awkward" (c. 1600), from shamble (n.) "table, bench" (see shambles), perhaps on the notion of the splayed legs of bench, or the way a worker sits astride it. Compare French bancal "bow-legged, wobbly" (of furniture), properly "bench-legged," from banc "bench." The noun meaning "a shambling gait" is from 1828. Related: Shambled; shambling.
Example
- 1. Why in the same industry some companies can continue to prosper , but some others shamble ?
- 2. Xinhua , a government news agency , quoted " insiders " as saying that efforts launched in 2002 to make electricity prices more market-driven would only " shamble ahead " in the coming five years , with no breakthrough expected .
- 3. A retiree in leshan , a city of the southwestern sichuan province , said via telephone that a wall in her garden collapsed , while a repairman in chongqing saw the ceiling of his factory shamble and alarmed the staff , who soon left the building .