shaggy dog story
Syllables: shag·gy dog sto·ry
shaggy dog story noun: an intentionally long-winded joke or tale featuring the narration of typically irrelevant details, and usually ending with an absurd or pointless punchline which is often a pun or Spoonerism on a known catchphrase, with the intended humor deriving from the combination of the excessive length and the anticlimax.
Noun
shaggy dog story (plural shaggy dog stories)
- An intentionally long-winded joke or tale featuring the narration of typically irrelevant details, and usually ending with an absurd or pointless punchline which is often a pun or Spoonerism on a known catchphrase, with the intended humor deriving from the combination of the excessive length and the anticlimax.
- The plot as Titus Oates described it to the Privy Council was something of a shaggy dog story, long on digressions and incidental details, but short on hard facts.2016, Anna Keay, chapter 11, in The Last Royal Rebel, London: Bloomsbury
- Synonyms:
- shaggy-dog tale, shaggy dog tale
Synonyms of shaggy dog story
Forms of shaggy dog story
| plural | shaggy dog stories |
|---|---|
| alternative form | shaggy-dog story |
Origin of shaggy dog story
Uncertain; probably from one of two jokes, one in which a protracted search for an alleged remarkably shaggy, talking dog ends in the discovery of the dog which, though it can indeed talk, is disappointingly not so shaggy after all; or one in which an even more protracted search for the shaggiest dog in the world ends in the utterly anticlimactic punchline “Now that’s a shaggy dog!”.
Words formed from shaggy dog story
Questions about shaggy dog story
- What does shaggy dog story mean?
- Shaggy dog story means an intentionally long-winded joke or tale featuring the narration of typically irrelevant details, and usually ending with an absurd or pointless punchline which is often a pun or Spoonerism on a known catchphrase, with the intended humor deriving from the combination of the excessive length and the anticlimax.
- What part of speech is shaggy dog story?
- Shaggy dog story is a noun.
- What is the plural of shaggy dog story?
- The plural of shaggy dog story is shaggy dog stories.
Words near shaggy dog story in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: shaggy dog story (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “shaggy dog story.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/shaggy_dog_story. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.