"three-ring circus" meaning in English

See three-ring circus in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Audio: En-au-three-ring circus.ogg [Australia] Forms: three-ring circuses [plural]
Head templates: {{en-noun|head=three-ring circus}} three-ring circus (plural three-ring circuses)
  1. A large circus in which three separate performances, each within its own circular enclosure, are staged simultaneously before a single audience. Categories (topical): Circus Synonyms: pandemonium
    Sense id: en-three-ring_circus-en-noun-CwBWoUt9 Disambiguation of Circus: 87 13 Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, English entries with topic categories using raw markup, English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 52 48 Disambiguation of English entries with topic categories using raw markup: 53 47 Disambiguation of English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys: 46 54
  2. (idiomatic, by extension) A disorderly, complicated, rapidly changing situation or set of events, which is a source of bewilderment, amazement, or amusement. Tags: broadly, idiomatic Synonyms (idiomatic: disorderly, complicated, rapidly changing situation): commotion
    Sense id: en-three-ring_circus-en-noun-~JH6ZwcJ Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, English entries with topic categories using raw markup, English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 52 48 Disambiguation of English entries with topic categories using raw markup: 53 47 Disambiguation of English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys: 46 54 Disambiguation of 'idiomatic: disorderly, complicated, rapidly changing situation': 7 93

Inflected forms

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for three-ring circus meaning in English (3.9kB)

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        "A large circus in which three separate performances, each within its own circular enclosure, are staged simultaneously before a single audience."
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          "ref": "1963 February 22, “Sport: Look! Another Record”, in Time",
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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 2024-04-30 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (210104c and c9440ce). 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.