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The Old English ancestor of shamble, the source of shambles, meant simply "stool, table." It gradually acquired the specialized meaning "meat table," being applied to meat sellers' stalls at markets (a street in the old butchers' quarter of York in northern England is still known as the Shambles). By a natural extension the plural form shambles came to denote a "slaughterhouse," and hence metaphorically any "place of carnage," but the milder modern sense "state of disorder or chaos" did not emerge until as recently as the early 20th century.
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