"shaggy dog story" meaning in All languages combined

See shaggy dog story on Wiktionary

Noun [English]

Forms: shaggy dog stories [plural]
Etymology: Uncertain; probably from one of two jokes, one in which a protracted search for an alleged remarkably shaggy, talking dog ends in the discovery of the dog which, though it can indeed talk, is disappointingly not so shaggy after all; or one in which an even more protracted search for the shaggiest dog in the world ends in the utterly anticlimactic punchline “Now that’s a shaggy dog!”. Etymology templates: {{unc|en}} Uncertain Head templates: {{en-noun}} shaggy dog story (plural shaggy dog stories)
  1. An intentionally long-winded joke or tale featuring the narration of typically irrelevant details, and usually ending with an absurd or pointless punchline which is often a pun or Spoonerism on a known catchphrase, with the intended humour deriving from the combination of the excessive length and the anticlimax. Synonyms: shaggy-dog story, shaggy-dog tale, shaggy dog tale Derived forms: shaggy God story Related terms: Banbury story of a cock and a bull, cock-and-bull story, fish story, tall tale, whopper
    Sense id: en-shaggy_dog_story-en-noun-c4mmtyno Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header

Inflected forms

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for shaggy dog story meaning in All languages combined (2.0kB)

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  "etymology_text": "Uncertain; probably from one of two jokes, one in which a protracted search for an alleged remarkably shaggy, talking dog ends in the discovery of the dog which, though it can indeed talk, is disappointingly not so shaggy after all; or one in which an even more protracted search for the shaggiest dog in the world ends in the utterly anticlimactic punchline “Now that’s a shaggy dog!”.",
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      "word": "shaggy dog tale"
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  "word": "shaggy dog story"
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-10 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (a644e18 and edd475d). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.