Gallimaufry is a word that is seldom used in common English, and may be confusing to some. We will examine the definition of the word gallimaufry, where it came from and some examples of its use in sentences.
Gallimaufry is jumble of unrelated things, a hodgepodge, a chaotic mixture of things. The word gallimaufry has been in use since the 1500s, and is derived from the French word galimafrée, which is dish or stew made up of odds and ends, of leftovers and foods one wishes to cook before going bad. The connotation here is of a dish that is not particularly appetizing. This meaning survives in the figurative meaning of the word gallimaufry, as it describes an item that has not had the benefit of planning, and has not had much thought invested in its design or execution.
Examples
From this cinematic gallimaufry avant-garde filmmaker Bill Morrison, who has also been called a visual archaeologist, created Dawson City: Frozen Time, which screens Friday, Oct. 20, in the Loew Auditorium in the Black Family Visual Arts Center at Dartmouth College. (Valley News)
The main text is laced through a gallimaufry of maps, photos, captions and sidebars, and rendered mostly in flat prose. (The New York Times)
This gallimaufry of identity-based fiefdoms illustrates the symbiosis between an artificially segmented, identity-obsessed student body and the campus bureaucracy: the more that students carve themselves into micro-groups claiming oppressed status, the more pretext there is for new cadres of administrators to shield them from oppression. (City Journal)
The Gospel is a perfect example of a possibly great piece that was allowed to sprawl into gallimaufry simply because there was no one with a red pen.(The Washington Classical Review)