shaggy dog story

1. 1.

   a long rambling joke whose humor derives from its pointlessness

   Broaderjoke

Questions about shaggy dog story

What does shaggy dog story mean?

shaggy dog story means "a long rambling joke whose humor derives from its pointlessness".

Is shaggy dog story a common word?

shaggy dog story is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.