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Imbroglio   Listen
noun
Imbroglio  n.  (pl. imbroglios)  (Written also embroglio)  
1.
An intricate, complicated plot, as of a drama or work of fiction.
2.
A complicated and embarrassing state of things; a serious misunderstanding or disagreement, especially one that is bitter. "Wrestling to free itself from the baleful imbroglio."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Imbroglio" Quotes from Famous Books



... sword was pointed everywhere, its hilt was in Berlin. Prussia supplied the mind which conceived the policy and controlled its execution; and in the circumstances of the Prussian Government must be sought the mainspring of the war. The cause of the war was not the Serbian imbroglio nor even German rivalry with Russia, France, or Britain. These were the occasions of its outbreak and extension; but national rivalries always exist and occasions for war are never wanting. They only result in war when one of the parties to the dispute wants to ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard

... alias Vignol, actor born in Paris, September 4, 1800. He appeared about 1822 at the Panorama-Dramatique theatre, on the Boulevard du Temple, Paris, playing the part of the Alcade in a three-act imbroglio by Raoul Nathan and Du Bruel entitled "L'Alcade dans l'embarras." At the first night performance he announced that the authors were Raoul and Cursy. Although very young at the time, this artist made his first great success in this role, and revealed ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe

... devotee of Indian peeris, as our Doctor said to the Pusser, I can't exactly say. Phyllis's was good enough after musketry practice at Mozambique. I couldn't get off the first two or three nights on account of what you might call an imbroglio with our Torpedo Lieutenant in the submerged flat, where some pride of the West country had sugared up a gyroscope; but I remember Vickery went ashore with our Carpenter Rigdon— old Crocus we called him. As a general rule Crocus never ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling

... wall-paper, and adorned with a full-length mirror, a sofa, and two chairs. There was a fireplace in the dressing-closet, a carpet on the floor, and cupboards all round the room. A dresser was putting the finishing touches to a Spanish costume; for Florine was to take the part of a countess in an imbroglio. ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac

... manuscript life of Howe by his old friend the late George Johnson. Lord Grey, with his invariable interest in things Canadian, has had the private correspondence of his uncle searched for anything that might throw light on the railway imbroglio of ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant

... could be compiled! The Liturgy, or adoptable and generally adopted Set of Prayers and Prayer-Method, was what we can call the Select Adoptabilities, 'Select Beauties' well edited (by [OE]cumenic Councils and other Useful-Knowledge Societies) from that wide waste imbroglio of Prayers already extant and accumulated, good and bad. The good were found adoptable by men; were gradually got together, well-edited, accredited: the bad, found inappropriate, unadoptable, were gradually forgotten, disused and burnt. It is the way with human things. The first man who, looking ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle

... joined him in bringing the Khedive to terms, and as his reward received a secret promise from the Porte to close the Dardanelles in case of war against Russia—to permit no foreign warships to pass through upon any pretext. There was indignation in Europe when this was known, and out of the whole imbroglio there came just what Nicholas and his minister Nesselrode had intended—a joint protection of Turkey by the Great Powers, from which France was excluded on account of her avowed sympathy for the Khedive in ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele

... administrative and legislative. By an artificial method of counting, Prussia, although she would command three-fifths of all the voters by virtue of her population, has less than one-third. Thus the possibility of an imbroglio between the governments is ever present, as well as that of a hasty vote ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various

... encouraging. He was deeply involved in Italian politics, where the daring of Garibaldi had reopened the struggle between clericals and liberals. In France itself the struggle between parties was keen. Here, as in the American imbroglio, he found it hard to decide with which party to break. The chimerical scheme of a Latin empire in Mexico was his spectacular device to catch the imagination, and incidentally the pocketbook, of everybody. But in order to carry out this enterprise ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson

... the reader familiar with the subject, it was also necessary to say a few words about the Europeans who played a part in that strange imbroglio—the Abyssinian difficulty. My knowledge of them, and of the events that occurred during our captivity, was acquired through personal experience, and also by intercourse with well-informed natives, during long months ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc

... that was salt and cold and yet not savage. Their glowing bodies reminded them that the prime necessities of life are earth and air, and the chance to eat well as they had eaten, and that in being in love they were the victims of a classic predicament, the current participators in the perpetual imbroglio with spiritual things that makes man ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West

... chassepots at Mentana dispersed Garibaldi and his red shirts bent on capturing the Eternal City. In the eighties, the Italians had good reason to suspect that the French Clericals were busy devising some imbroglio through which the Pope might be ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times

... the party who would extend the area of Freedom. Do they make Slavery a matter of federal concern by means of the Supreme Court?—they are the party who maintain that it is an affair of local law. Do they disfranchise a race?—they are the party of equal rights. And the whole wretched imbroglio of creed which is the condemnation of their action, and of action, which is the death of their creed, is dubbed Nationality. If sectionalism be the reverse of all this, we confess that we prefer sectionalism. It is a nationality which has no Northern half, a conservatism ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various

... had elapsed since the fatal imbroglio of Salem witchcraft. He had probably long been convinced that it was vain to attempt to shake the general conviction, expressed by Calef, that he had been "the most active and forward of any Minister in the country in those matters," and acquiesced in the general disposition ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham

... reign of Louis VII., called the Young, was a period barren of events and of persons worthy of keeping a place in history. We have already had the story of this king's unfortunate crusade from 1147 to 1149, the commencement at Antioch of his imbroglio with his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and the fatal divorce which, in 1152, at the same time that it freed the king from a faithless queen, entailed for France the loss of the beautiful provinces she had brought him in dowry, and caused them to pass into ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... first instalment on the day on which the task was offered me; but I had no experience, and no notion of a plot, and before I was through with the business, I had so entangled my characters that my only way out of the imbroglio I had myself created was to send every man Jack and woman Jill of them, with the exception of the hero and the heroine, to the bottom of a coal mine, where I comfortably drowned them all. In the last chapter my hero asked the lady of his heart, "Are there no troubles now?" and the lady of his ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray

... all the authentic literature I could lay hold of bearing upon the Parnell imbroglio, and it leaves me with the firm conviction that if there had not been an almost unbelievable concatenation of errors and misunderstandings and stupid blunderings, Parnell need never have been sacrificed. And the fact stands ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan



Words linked to "Imbroglio" :   mistaking, misunderstanding, misinterpretation, embroilment, situation



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