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A ragman roll was a parchment scroll used in a medieval gambling game. The roll had things such as names written on it, with pieces of string attached to them, and participants had to select a string at random. The word ragman may have been a contraction of ragged man, perhaps in allusion to the appearance of the scroll, with all its bits of string hanging from it. Ragman roll eventually came to be used for any list or catalog, and ragman itself denoted a "long rambling discourse" in 16th-century Scottish English - a meaning that seems to have transferred itself eventually to rigmarole.
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