Meaning of Spaghetti | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A type of pasta made in the shape of long thin strings.
   countable, uncountable, usually
2. A dish that has spaghetti (noun 1 sense 1) as a main part of it, such as spaghetti bolognese.
   broadly, countable, uncountable, usually
3. Denoting Italianness.
   broadly, countable, derogatory, informal, uncountable, usually
4. An Italian person.
   broadly, countable, derogatory, informal, uncountable, usually
5. Ellipsis of spaghetti western (“a motion picture depicting a story of cowboys and desperadoes set in the American Old West, but produced by an Italian-based company and filmed in Europe, notably in Italy”).
   abbreviation, alt-of, broadly, countable, ellipsis, uncountable, usually
6. Something physically resembling spaghetti (noun 1 sense 1) in appearance or consistency, or in being tangled.
   attributive, broadly, informal, often, uncountable, usually
7. Electrical insulating tubing or electrical wiring.
   attributive, broadly, informal, often, uncountable, usually
8. Roads forming a complex junction, especially one with multiple levels on a motorway.
   attributive, broadly, informal, often, uncountable, usually
9. Something confusing or intricate.
   figuratively, informal, uncountable, usually
10. Ellipsis of spaghetti code (“unstructured or poorly structured program source code, especially code with many GOTO statements or their equivalent”).
    abbreviation, alt-of, derogatory, ellipsis, figuratively, informal, uncountable, usually

Equivalents

Examples

“Her mother was cooking spaghetti for dinner.”

“Maccheroni, or Spaghetti, a smaller kind of macaroni, sufficient for the dinner of an ordinary mortal, generally follows the soup. It is as a rule served up with tomato sauce, and Parmesan cheese thickly scattered over it.”

“spaghetti grid    spaghetti junction    spaghetti limbs    spaghetti strap    spaghetti stripes”

“Or how about that spaghetti of cables, adaptors and plugs you keep in a box somewhere, the detritus of old phones, laptops and tablets — each with a different charging point — is that not an example of staggeringly wasteful, bad design?”

““But the infrastructure is like spaghetti,” he continued. “It’s chaotic, it doesn’t connect up and there’s no cohesive network. If you can get that right, it will eliminate a lot of confusion.””

“The lands along the Danube, by contrast, seemed wide open. That is, if he could find his way through them. “Arrows drawn on maps build up into an astonishing spaghetti of population movement,” Mr. Winder writes, and a single city like Lviv, now in Ukraine, might also have been called Lemberg, Lemberik, Lwow or Lvov.”

“In an age when the charts have become an algorithmic spaghetti of streaming plays, radio and downloads, the purest way of measuring who is up and who is down in pop might be the Billboard Social 50, a sub-chart that measures reach across social networks.”

“Then there’s payments tech. Over the past decade, private equity has been instrumental in consolidating that industry; Worldpay and Nexi serve as two good examples. And while the logic of creating economies of scale was simple, this created a spaghetti of IT technical debt with disparate systems, which hampered the speed of innovation.”

CEFR level