Word.ws English Dictionary

sound and fury

sound and fury noun: impotent or meaningless ranting.

Noun

sound and fury (uncountable)

  1. Impotent or meaningless ranting.
    • […] I met Babu in the Ugandan capital, Kampula, during the Pan African Movement meeting and he was full of sound and fury, backing the divisive (and now discredited) ethnic politics of the regime in Ethiopia. In fact, Babu was a radical nationalist who was never able to surpass the limitations of...2003, New African (issues 414-424, page 5)

Origin of sound and fury

From William Shakespeare's play Macbeth, in which life is said to be "a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing".

Questions about sound and fury

What does sound and fury mean?
Sound and fury means impotent or meaningless ranting.
What part of speech is sound and fury?
Sound and fury is a noun.

Words near sound and fury in the dictionary

  1. soums
  2. Soumya
  3. Soumyā
  4. Soun
  5. sound
  6. sound and fury
  7. sound art
  8. sound artist
  9. sound artists
  10. sound as a barrel
  11. sound as a bell

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sound and fury (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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