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SNAFU.

A confused, muddled, or messed-up condition or state; a ridiculously chaotic situation; confusion or chaos regarded as the normal state.

5 characters2 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/snæˈfuː/UK/ˈsnæfuː/UK/snæˈfu/US/ˈsnæfu/US
  1. A confused, muddled, or messed-up condition or state; a ridiculously chaotic situation; confusion or chaos regarded as the normal state.

  2. A major glitch or breakdown; a mistake or blunder.

Where this word comes from

The term was born during the Second World War as an acronym of the initials of the words situation normal, all fucked up, which summed up the chaos and confusion of the war from an individual soldier’s point of view.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.