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turmoil

nounverbattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈtɜːmɔɪl//

A state of great disorder or uncertainty.

noun

  1. 1

    A state of great disorder or uncertainty.

    Oleg Blokhin's side lost the talismanic Andriy Shevchenko to the substitutes' bench because of a knee injury but still showed enough to put England through real turmoil in spells.

    The Taoists developed their philosophy during an extended era of turmoil known as the Warring States period of Chinese history.

  2. 2

    Harassing labor; trouble; disturbance.

    And there I'll rest, as after much turmoil, / A blessed soul doth in Elysium.

    The turmoil went on—no rest, no peace. […] It was nearly eleven o'clock now, and he strolled out again. In the little fair created by the costers' barrows the evening only seemed beginning; and the naphtha flares made one's eyes ache, the men's voices grated harshly, and the girls' faces saddened one.

Etymology

Unknown. First appears c. 1526. Perhaps from Old French tremouille (“the hopper of a mill”).

verb

  1. 1

    obsoleteTo be disquieted or confused; to be in commotion.

    some notable sophister lies sweating and turmoiling under the inevitable and merciless delimmas of Socrates

  2. 2

    obsoleteTo harass with commotion; to disquiet; to worry.

    It is her fatal misfortune […] to be thus miserably tossed and turmoiled with these storms of affliction.

Forms

plural
turmoils
past tense
turmoiled
past participle
turmoiled
present participle
turmoiling
third person singular
turmoils
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).