It's Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for April 1st.
Today's word is shambles, spelled S-H-A-M-B-L-E-S.
Shambles is a noun.
It refers to a place or state in which there is great confusion, disorder, or destruction.
Here's the word used in a sentence from Digital Trends by Christopher Hinton.
In this film,
three friends reconnect and find themselves attempting to relive the glory days after suffering several defeats that life has thrown their way.
After heading to a once-beloved ski resort, they find it in shambles.
The story of the word shambles appears to be a bit of a shambles.
Somehow, a word meaning footstool gave us a word meaning mess.
It all starts with the Latin word scamilum.
the diminutive of skamnum, meaning stool or bench.
Modify the spelling and you get the old English word skeimal, meaning stool.
Alter again to the middle English word shameles, the plural of shamel,
and give it a more specific meaning of a vendor's table.
Tweak that a little bit and you arrive at the 15th century term shambles, meaning meat market.
A century or so later,
shambles moves from meat market to slaughterhouse and then to a figurative application as a term referring to a place of terrible slaughter or bloodshed,
say a battlefield.
The grim connotations fade over time, but the messiness remains, and voila.