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View synonyms for shaggy-dog story
shaggy-dog story
[ shag-ee-dawg, -dog ]
noun
- a funny story, traditionally about a talking dog, that, after an often long and involved narration of unimportant incidents, has an absurd or irrelevant punch line.
shaggy dog story
noun
- informal.a long rambling joke ending in a deliberate anticlimax, such as a pointless punch line
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Word History and Origins
Origin of shaggy-dog story1
First recorded in 1945–50
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Idioms and Phrases
A long drawn-out anecdote with an absurd or anticlimactic ending. For example, At first he had us laughing wildly at his shaggy-dog stories, but after the third or fourth we found them tiresome . The term alludes to a well-known series of such stories, which involved a talking dog. [c. 1940]Advertisement
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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