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The word pell-mell was probably formed through a process called reduplication. This process—which involves the repetition of a word or part of a word, with often a slight change in its form—also generated the terms flip-flop, chitchat, and shilly-shally, the last of which comes from a single-word compression of the question “Shall I?” For pell-mell, the process is believed to have occurred long ago: our word traces to a Middle French word of the same meaning, pelemele, which comes from the Old French word pesle mesle, likely a product of reduplication from the Old French word mesle, a form of mesler, meaning “to mix” or “to mingle.”
Examples of pell-mell in a Sentence
Lance Eliot, Forbes.com, 4 July 2025
People ran pell-mell outside, sped away in cars with no clear destination, went to church, or just phoned the police or radio station to hyperventilate.
—Nicolas Rapold, airmail.news, 23 Nov. 2024
Abe and Mary are part Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara, part George and Martha, part the old vaudevillians George Burns and Gracie Allen, all running together pell-mell toward the Copacabana.
—Chris Jones, New York Daily News, 12 July 2024
Administration officials don’t see this situation as similar to October 2022, when the intelligence community saw a significant possibility Putin might use tactical nuclear weapons to avert a collapse of Russia’s front lines in Ukraine and prevent a pell-mell retreat.
—David Ignatius, Washington Post, 21 June 2024
Ultimately, the more naturalistic second half — which has a realistic set with chairs and tables, delivered in a clunky black-out transition by intrusive stagehands — gets as sharp and loud as the pell-mell sounds-and-lights first half.
—Christopher Arnott, Hartford Courant, 12 Apr. 2024
Only a few of them stopped with remainder racing pell-mell through the intersection as approaching cars on Charles braked abruptly.
—Reader Commentary, Baltimore Sun, 25 Apr. 2024
Ministry is not nearly as proficient as Chad Stahelski’s John Wick 4 or Matthias Schweighöfer’s Army of Thieves, but the pell-mell combat scenes are consistently cartoonish.
—Armond White, National Review, 19 Apr. 2024
America saw a pell-mell downsizing of gas-guzzling vehicles and a simultaneous ramping up of imports of fuel-efficient Japanese cars.
—Jim Krane, Fortune, 12 Oct. 2023
Cite this Entry
“Pell-mell.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pell-mell. Accessed 10 Jul. 2025.
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