megillah means any of the Five Scrolls of the Hebrew Scriptures (Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther). It carries an Arena rating of 1557, earned across 24 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, megillah ranks #294 of 13,223 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #327 of 13,223 for Most Storied Words, #1,469 of 13,223 for Most Whimsical Words, #1,667 of 13,223 for Funniest Words.
megillah is pronounced /məˈɡɪlə/.
Why “megillah” is a great word
A long, involved, and often tediously detailed story or account. From Yiddish *megile*, from Biblical Hebrew *məgillāh* (“scroll, roll”), from the root *g-l-l* (“to roll”); it first unspooled into English in its extended sense in 1905. Unlike an “anecdote”—a pithy, amusing snippet—or a “summary”—its merciful distillation, a megillah is a narrative unraveled to its exhaustive, sometimes exhausting, length. It is the relative who insists on beginning a joke with the dawn of time, the bureaucratic form that demands a full account of your life since birth, or the sacred scroll itself, unfurled to reveal every twist of fate—a testament to the human compulsion to leave no part of the story, however minor, unrolled.
Etymology
From Hebrew מגילה / מְגִלָּה (m'gilá, “scroll”). Doublet of magilla.
noun
- Any of the Five Scrolls of the Hebrew Scriptures (Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther)“Song of Songs, one of the five Megillot ("Scrolls") of Ketuvim ("Writings") recited either before or after Minhah on the eve of every Sabbath, after the Seder on Passover, and publicly in the synagogue in the Ashkenazic tradition.”
- The Book of Esther.
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