(n.) A mingled mass; a confused mixture; a stew of various ingredients; a hodgepodge.
(n.) A blending of property for equality of division, as when lands given in frank-marriage to one daughter were, after the death of the ancestor, blended with the lands descending to her and to her sisters from the same ancestor, and then divided in equal portions among all the daughters. In modern usage, a mixing together, or throwing into a common mass or stock, of the estate left by a person deceased and the amounts advanced to any particular child or children, for the purpose of a more equal division, or of equalizing the shares of all the children; the property advanced being accounted for at its value when given.
Example Sentences:
(1) More than £600m has been spent on the massive universal credit project, intended to replace a hotchpotch of benefits and tax credit topups with a simple, single monthly payment to claimants that would include a "subsidy to work".
(2) As David Cameron prepared to deliver his "aspiration nation" speech to the Conservative conference in Birmingham, 110 miles away in Margaret Thatcher's former constituency a hotchpotch alliance of squatters, retired booksellers, local bloggers and international anti-capitalist activists whooped as a district judge blocked attempts to close a vibrant community library that has popped up in the shell of one controversially closed as part of the Conservative party's most radical experiment yet in shrinking local public services.
(3) The grimy streets of central St Pauli, a rough neighbourhood where sailors once passed their time on shore, are lined with a hotchpotch of trendy bars, clubs and music venues – as well as the handful of seedier establishments which made Hamburg infamous.
(4) The Marwood in The Lanes, for example, is a wonderful hotchpotch of reclaimed bits and pieces with old cupboard doors as table tops and even Apple Mac hard drive towers as stools.
(5) We knew what was required: in cases like ours, to stand any chance of meaningful success, you need a truckload of informational wherewithal, the will to fight, and the money to hire a good lawyer – which, at a stroke, scythes out millions of parents, who are left with only piecemeal help, and hotchpotch provision.
(6) We confront the problem with an unedifying hotchpotch of neuroses and political spasms that ensure we never truly see it in the round, never discuss it rationally and never get to grips with it.
(7) At the heart of every movie, all made on small budgets and drawing on a hotchpotch of British and European money, there has been a cause; from the Spanish civil war ( Land And Freedom ) to the Contra insurgency against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua ( Carla’s Song ), from trade union rights in the US ( Bread And Roses : the only film he has made in North America) to Ireland’s war of independence ( The Wind That Shakes The Barley ) and, most of all, the struggle for work, dignity and justice ( Raining Stones , Sweet Sixteen , It’s A Free World , My Name Is Joe , The Angels’ Share – basically all of them ).
(8) The deputy prime minister admits the plan has failed, blaming the creation of a "hotchpotch of schemes".
(9) Tarantino's genre hotchpotch might have made for something of a soundclash, but its highly entertaining din might be just the clarion call required to shake fresh life into the genre.
(10) Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader, said Brown's statement was "nothing more than a hotchpotch of unrelated Whitehall schemes, a ministerial cut and paste job".
(11) She spent 18 months in the cabinet at the ministry of culture, overseeing a hotchpotch of responsibilities from ballet and broadband to table tennis and tourism.
(12) He, along with his predecessor, is too spineless to stand up for the gay minority, and exposes his church as incapable of living up to the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 1, "all human beings are equal in dignity and rights", and nothing more than a hotchpotch of amoral stone-age superstition.
(13) It was a hotchpotch of a speech, providing neither inspiration nor challenge.
Melange
Definition:
(n.) A mixture; a medley.
Example Sentences:
(1) Ultimately, the judgments combine to make a particularly peculiar melange: among the plaintiffs there is a mix of economic pessimism and insecure nationalism with a shot of nostalgia for the Deutschmark.
(2) Party conferences are always weird melanges of loyal door-knockers, lobbyists, journalists and parliamentarians enjoying a few days of stolen glamour.
(3) I choose the halibut fillet with scallops, dauphinoise potatoes, veg melange and pesto tapenade.
(4) The regime of thermal treatment applied to the ice-cream melange produced bactericidal effect on the Enterococcus microflora.
(5) Each chapter is a melange of storylines building to an end of chapter cliffhanger that hooks the reader as firmly as Brookie’s go-to-ad-break jeopardy.
(6) He finds meaning in the melange of largely bad food he was served as a child and revels in his love affair with trains that is now deprived him by his immobile condition.
(7) The truth is that the center of gravity for many international manufacturing companies has long ago scattered from a single base in the US to a global melange of places with cheap labor and lower taxes.
(8) Previous studies have demonstrated that chronic exposure of rats to a melange of ultra-mild stressors causes an antidepressant-reversible decrease in the intake of palatable weak sucrose solutions, as well as other evidence of insensitivity to rewards.
(9) Roman Polanski then made it into a film that, despite being a melange of confused accents (every single actor is speaking in an accent other than their own – and, boy, you don’t forget it), was his most enjoyable movie for years.
(10) They were fine with her Poem For Dzhokhar, too: "Anything that emotionally affects me becomes part of the melange of thoughts, and then art, that I create."
(11) Azonutril 25 was given as nutritive melange, maintaining a calorie-nitrogen ratio of 150 to 200 calories for every added gram of nitrogen.
(12) It may be that the major direct effect of MTX on epidermal cell proliferation is complemented or even mediated by subtle immunoregulatory effects on the melange of cells in the affected skin and the systemic immune response.
(13) A deliriously tragic-comic autobiopic, with startling unmatched editing and a melange of elevating music sources, it became Kuchar's signature movie.
(14) They may be related also to the activity of mycobacterial adjuvant as a vehicle for the induction of delayed hypersensitivity on the basis that this melange activates macrophages to phagocytose and enzymatically degrade macromolecular antigens rapidly.
(15) The landscape stays stunningly harsh all the way across to the Apache Indian homelands of southern Arizona, where the mining camp-cum-artists' community of Bisbee adds another take on this classic American melange.
(16) In just 17 days, the pair recorded the album Let’s Dance, an irresistible melange of funk and pop that became Bowie’s most popular album ever, but saw him abdicate from his decade-long position on rock music’s cutting edge.
(17) Summarized results of five-year microbiologic studies on the production of dried egg products (white of egg, yolk, and melange), are presented.
(18) His quip that no one will find out what he got up to in City Hall because everything incriminating had been shredded; his cheap oil deal with Venezuela; and his failure to deal adequately with the toxic, largely unsubstantiated melange of allegations levelled by the Evening Standard against his then equalities adviser Lee Jasper .
(19) In freezing the ice-cream melange the amount of Enterococcus microflora dropped from 3.2 to 3.3 times.
(20) To accomplish the release of the gas, huge quantities of water are injected at high pressure together with a melange of toxic chemicals that can contaminate water supplies and rivers.