How can you not love that word? Pan-demon-ium = All hell breaking loose. Clearly and obviously. This should be the shortest entry I ever post.

I think we think of it as a condition – pandemonium in the streets – and the dictionary definition for pandemonium uncapitalized is in fact wild disorder, noise, confusion.

But the word is capitalized in my book, and its other definitions are (at least) a place of wild disorder, noise or confusion, and (most likely) Hell.

First used in 1667. By Milton, for Paradise Lost.

I look on the Internet. There it is mostly the uncapitalized definition: tumult, noise.

My dictionary was published in 1979.

This unscientific sampling indicates that, in the last thirty years, Pandemonium the place has sunk in our conversation, but pandemonium the condition is still with us.

(By the way, and speaking of tumult, Danny once had a school assignment to come up with examples of multiple vowels. He got stuck searching for words with 4 u’s, and asked for help. Eventually we remembered unscrupulous and, better: tumultuous. I suppose if you didn’t want to use tumultuous you could say pandemoniacal instead).