"sound and fury" meaning in English

See sound and fury in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Etymology: From Shakespeare's play Macbeth, in which life is said to be "a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing". Head templates: {{en-noun|-}} sound and fury (uncountable)
  1. Impotent or meaningless ranting. Tags: uncountable
    Sense id: en-sound_and_fury-en-noun-aCOMZJkU Categories (other): English coordinated pairs, English entries with incorrect language header, Pages with 1 entry, Pages with entries
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  "head_templates": [
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        "1": "-"
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  "lang_code": "en",
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      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "2003, New African (issues 414-424, page 5)",
          "text": "[…] I met Babu in the Ugandan capital, Kampula, during the Pan African Movement meeting and he was full of sound and fury, backing the divisive (and now discredited) ethnic politics of the regime in Ethiopia. In fact, Babu was a radical nationalist who was never able to surpass the limitations of his \"island\" […]"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "Impotent or meaningless ranting."
      ],
      "id": "en-sound_and_fury-en-noun-aCOMZJkU",
      "links": [
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          "Impotent",
          "impotent#English"
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      "tags": [
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  "word": "sound and fury"
}
{
  "etymology_text": "From Shakespeare's play Macbeth, in which life is said to be \"a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing\".",
  "head_templates": [
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        "1": "-"
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-01-31 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-01-20 using wiktextract (bcd5c38 and 9dbd323). 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.

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