Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Hurly-burly \Hur"ly-bur`ly\, n. [Reduplicated fr. OE. hurly
confusion: cf. F. hurler to howl, yell, L. ululare; or cf. E.
hurry.]
Tumult; bustle; confusion.
--Shak.
All places were filled with tumult and hurly-burly.
--Knolles.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
also hurlyburly, 1530s, apparently an alteration of phrase hurling and burling, reduplication of 14c. hurling "commotion, tumult," verbal noun of hurl (q.v.). Hurling time was the name applied by chroniclers to the period of tumult and commotion around Wat Tyler's rebellion.
Wiktionary
n. (alternative spelling of hurlyburly English)
Wikipedia
Hurly-Burly: The International Lacanian Journal of Psychoanalysis is a magazine.
Usage examples of "hurly-burly".
Gifts that arrive at home obviously ought to be declared by the client to his employer, just in case they were ever to influence him in deciding who to give a piece of business to, but somehow in the hurly-burly of the run-up to Christmas, when there are a thousand and one things to do, some things may be overlooked.
Sunday department viewed itself as an ivory tower above the hurly-burly of the daily paper, turning out articles on timeless matters such as recipes for gazpacho and How to Train Your Dog to Love You.
It is not every day that a Judge of the Chancery Division finds himself plunged into the hurly-burly of police work, and Puffkins forgot even the refined delights of the base fee in contemplation of detection in real life.
III After the hum of the Forum and the hurly-burly of the Roman squares, the Falco apartment was blessedly still, though faint noises rose from the street below and occasional birdsong could be heard across the acres of red tiled roofs.
He half turned to the stair, thinking he would go back to Hangtown and accept the hurly-burly.
At the hospital, Luis picked his way through hallways jammed with squealing gurneys and the hurly-burly of medical heroics.
Unlike the other groups in this book, the civil libertarians have operated very much in the open, more or less right in the public hurly-burly.
At seven-thirty on a Sunday morning London was a hive of activity, men in blue, men in khaki, backs bent to shovels and piles of debris, half in and half out of the half-houses, twisting and wriggling through the ruins, seeking out the trapped, the living, the dying and the deadwires and pipes bursting from the ground like the spilt entrails of a gored beast, pools of water sitting motionless upon the tarmac, curls of grey smoke rising up into the spring sky from the brickfields of flattened buildings, engines of pumping, engines of rescue, engines of demolition, all the machinery of antiwarand it was as though Bosch had met Breughel, Bosch had met and merged with Avercamp, in the limitless vista of the busy human landscape, the hurly-burly of a gruesome-beautiful urban-pastoral.
Gaius Philippus asked the caravaneer, "What's all your hurly-burly about?
It was so different from the hurly-burly of The Ramblings, but she already felt at home.
They found him after lunch in a grass field outside the small Oxfordshire town of Abingdon, among the hurly-burly of his swings and roundabouts and flip-flops and dodgem cars, and the Wall of Death and Sawing Through a Woman, and the many tables upon which you roll a penny for a girl to pick it up and drop it in a bucket by her side.