Word of the Day:

“A tangled web of interpersonal feuds, played out in letters to the local newspaper, in social media posts and via legal filings in county court, has left the town with no clear path out of a situation that’s not covered by state law. The imbroglio has even reached the state Capitol ...” — Seth Klamann and Sam Tabachnik, The Denver Post, 8 Mar. 2026

More example sentences

Ever noticed how an imbroglio embroils people in controversy? There’s a reason for that—an etymological one, anyway. Both the noun imbroglio (referring to, among other things, a scandal or bitter argument) and verb embroil (“to involve in conflicts or difficulties”) come from the Middle French word embrouiller, a combination of the prefix en- and brouiller, meaning “to jumble,” though they took slightly different paths. Embroil’s was direct, passing from Middle French through French and into English around the turn of the 16th century. Italians altered embrouiller to form imbrogliare, meaning “to entangle,” which spawned the noun imbroglio that English speakers embraced in the mid-18th century. English imbroglio first referred to a confused mass, and later expanded to cover confusing social situations such as complicated disputes, misunderstandings, and scandals.