I’ve always heard people say “rig-a-ma-role”. However, when checking on onelook.com, “rigmarole” (a spelling I’d never seen) has 25+ entries, while “rigamarole” only has 15. Is one more proper than the other?
I believe “rigmarole” is the only correct spelling, and pronunciation.
The OED has rigmarole going back to 1736, and no entry at all for rigamarole. nor any suggestion that there is a variant pronunciation which inserts an extra syllable.
Google offers c. 287,000 hits for rigmarole, and c. 90,600 for rigamarole, so the latter form is used, but it seems to be the minority usage.
There is a board game in the US called Rigamarole. My wild speculation woudl be that the manufacturers of this game inserted an extra letter in rigmarole so that they could trademark the word thus coined, and it may be that the promotion of the board game has led to the spread of rigamarole generally. The fact that the OED doesn’t note it suggests that it may be (a) a US usage, and (b) a recent one.
My copy of the *OED *only lists “rigmarole” as the spelling and only gives that pronunciation without the inserted vowel. My copy of the American Heritage Dictionary gives “rigamarole” as a possible alternate spelling with the inserted vowel as being the pronunciation for that spelling. I’d say that you should assume that “rigmarole” is the standard spelling and pronunciation. It appears that “rigamarole” is slowly becoming more common as the pronunciation and even more slowly as the spelling. This is a common sort of pronunciation change, where a vowel is inserted to make the word easier to pronounce.
I suggest you avoid the confusion, and use “boondoggle” instead.
I tend to disagree.
You would.
I put “rigamarole” in the same category as “sherbert.”
And “orangutang!”
There was too much rigamarole involved when the athalete and the orangutang were eating sherbert.
I would say the opposite on both counts. I’ve never heard it pronounced or spelled that way, always “rigamarole.”
In the end, it doesn’t really matter, of course.
Where do you live? Rigamarole sounds like the sort of pronunciation somebody attempting a comedic Italian accident might use.
Or a musical theatre librettist looking to make a line scan.
New England/New York area checking in. Not that it’s a word often heard, but the rigamarole pronunciation is what I am used to. It’s particularly apparent when I spell it; I tend to add the extra ‘a’ and then have to look it up.
I too live the Northeastern US and until reading this post I’d never, ever heard it referred to as ‘rig-marole’ even once in my entire life. Why would anyone pronounce it like that? It’s cumbersome and unnatural to do nearly a full stop between the hard ‘g’ and the ‘m’ consonant sounds without inserting a vowel sound.
It’s spelled and pronounced that way because, apparently, it’s derived from ragman roll, a parlour game popular in the fourteenth century. A number of verses or mottoes of a personal character were written on separate sheets of paper, each with a string or cord attached. The sheets were then rolled up with the strings dangling out of one end. Each player took one of the strings, extracted the sheet of paper which was attached and then read the verse or motto aloud. Whatever he read was taken to apply to him.
I know, it sounds hilarious. But I suppose it helped to pass the time until you were carried off by the black death.
Strictly speaking, the game was “ragman”, and the “ragman roll” was the bunch of rolled up papers with the strings hanging out. By the sixteenth century “ragman roll” came to mean any long or rambling discourse, especially a convoluted and improbable excuse or explanation. By the eighteenth century “ragman roll” had become “rigmarole”. In the nineteenth century the meaning expanded from long rambling discourse to include long, involved and tedious procedures and processes.
The “rigamarole” spelling and pronunciation is, I think, an exclusively US variant, and I had never heard it in Ireland, the UK or Australia, or been aware of it until this thread. I hypothesised back in 2009 that it was coined to create a trade-markable word to use as the name of a board game. Another possibility is that it simply evolved in the US as an easier-to-articulate variant, and was then adopted as the name of the board game.
There’s nothing unnatural about it. There’s a clear syllable break. It’s no harder than saying “big man.”
Still, I nearly always hear and see “rigamarole,” too. I assumed people leaving out the a were just doing the same type of elision as done in chocolate.
As I said six years ago, this is a common sort of pronunciation change. It’s epenthesis (or more specifically anaptyxis). A sound is added to a word to make it easier to pronounce:
This and this. I read the OP and thought, well, since rigmarole isn’t even a word, the answer is rigamarole. :smack:
I agree, I never heard anything but “rigamarole”, but if the older spelling was the original, your post is a perfect explanation of why it changed. I grew up in Philadelphia FWIW.
Evidently rigmarole is only “cumbersome and unnatural” in the variety of English spoken in the US, and perhaps particularly the north-eastern US, since posters from there not only use rigamarole but say they have never heard the other usage. In most of the rest of the Anglophone world, however, it’s rigmarole which is standard, and rigamarole which either sounds contrived or is simply never heard.
Which raise the question; what is the particular characteristic of English as spoken in [north-eastern] US which makes rigmarole awkward?