AAFGORR

Word of the Week: 

A feature wherein TileHead highlights a word that is is especially interesting or unusual (and, incidentally, useful in Scrabble play):

AAFGORR

(unscramble the letters to form this week's word...)

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(answer below, after a little more spoiler space....)

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This week's word is...

FARRAGO n. pl. -ES

• Definition: a confused mixture; an assortment or medley; a hodgepodge

• Front hooks: (none)
• Back hooks: (none)
• Anagrams: (none)
• Longer extensions: -ES 
• Wraparounds: (none)
• Other Spellings: (none)
• Related Forms: FARRAGINOUS (adj.)

TileHead says:

• The Latin word farrago meant a mixed fodder for cattle (from far, meaning spelt or corn), and by extension any figurative mixture or jumble.  English adopted the figurative sense of the word, as well as its adjectival form FARRAGINOUS, at least as early as the 17th century, as illustrated in this colorful passage:
  
  For being a confusion of knaves and fools, and a farraginous concurrence of all conditions, tempers, sexes, and ages, it is but natural if their determinations be monstrous and many ways inconsistent with truth.
  -- Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica: Or, Enquiries into Common and Vulgar Errors, 1646
  
  It's still used today in the same sense:
  
  In fact, a room with four or five mirrors arranged at random, is, for all purposes of artistic show, a room of no shape at all. If we add to this evil, the attendant glitter upon glitter, we have a perfect farrago of discordant and displeasing effects.
  -- Shirley Morris, Interior Decoration: A Complete Course, 2007