Mayhem! Chaos! Pandemonium!

Originally another name for Bethlehem, bedlam took a turn toward chaos when it was used a nickname for The Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem — a home for the mentally ill. Language hasn’t always been kind to people with mental illness, so terms such as madhouse and bedlam have often been used for general disorder. From the 1600s on, bedlam was used to mean any madhouse, then as a term for insanity in general, whether clinical or colloquial.

Fact: Words created by reduplication are the funnest words. Want proof? Consider words such as helter-skelter, mumbo jumbo, fiddle-faddle, and loosey-goosey. Reduplicative words can alter the initial consonant (namby-pamby) or the vowel sound (twiddle-twaddle). They can also simply repeat a whole word or sound, as in no-no and bye-bye. Brouhaha has that type of reduplication, doubling ha to create a word for a restaurant-quality hubbub (another reduplicative word).

An unpredictable, lawless, wild, anything-goes free-for-all. Chaos is unstable and often scary.

A chaotic situation: a messy room is in a state of disarray.

The opposite of order: a state of chaos where things have gone higgledy-piggledy and helter-skelter.

The original sense of havoc is military in origin. This term has been often found in phrases such as “make havoc” and “play havoc,” though I’m partial to the phrase “wreak havoc.” A famous variation appeared in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “Cry hauocke, and let slip the Dogges of Warre.”

These days, mayhem tends to be used broadly for any sort of chaotic situation, but its origins are more specific and criminal. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests mayhem is a variation of maim dating back to the 1400s. By the 1800s, it had broadened to cover violence in general, but it’s not till the twentieth century that the word morphed to cover a chaotic brouhaha.

Speaking of fun words, few have a fun quotient higher than pandemonium, though the origin wasn’t especially conducive to a good time: since the 1600s, pandemonium was a term for hell, specifically the capital of the underworld. Gradually, the word morphed from the abode of evil — which is presumably not an orderly locale — to a word for any sort of whoop-de-do or ruckus.

This is similar to tumult, but a little softer in meaning. If a parent hears their children fighting over the remote control, they might say, “What’s the ruckus?” A ruckus can be any noisy, unruly situation.

This word, first found in the 1400s, is defined by the OED as, “Commotion of a multitude, usually with confused speech or uproar; public disturbance; disorderly or riotous proceeding.” A tumult is like an upheaval with a touch of bedlam.

Originally, this word—which has “heave up” in its bones—was literal, referring to a geological movement upward, especially by a volcano. This geographical meaning has first found in the 1800s, but the non-literal sense is more common these days. There are many types of upheaval. If the citizens of a control are protesting against the government, there’s social upheaval. If the stock market is unstable, there’s financial upheaval. Upheaval is any a major sort of disruption or disturbance.