Rube Goldberg

adjective

having a fantastically complicated, improvised appearance:
a Rube Goldberg arrangement of flasks and test tubes.
deviously complex and impractical:
a Rube Goldberg scheme for reducing taxes.

Goldberg, Rube

A twentieth-century American cartoonist and sculptor. He was famous for his humorous diagrams of incredibly intricate machines designed to carry out simple tasks.

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Notes

A “Rube Goldberg contraption” is a machine with many apparently extraneous parts, which appears to have been designed by patchwork.

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Word History and Origins

Origin of Rube Goldberg¹

1955–60; after Rube ( Reuben ) Goldberg

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Example Sentences

Examples have not been reviewed.

He is also a massive global embarrassment, the glaring flaw that proves the entire Rube Goldberg machine is no longer working.

From

Come for the Rube Goldberg machines, leave feeling like a rube.

From

That frenzy to create a "mini-primary" or some kind of Rube Goldberg mechanism to pick a candidate was largely based on that knee-jerk opinion.

From

When ARID1A is mutated, a microscopic chain of events analogous to a Rube Goldberg machine is set off in the cancer cell.

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Skinner and his pigeons, into behaviorism — a school of thought that considered behavior a Rube Goldberg machine of stimulus and response governed by reflex, disregarding interior mental states and emotional response.

From

rubefy rub elbows with

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