having a fantastically complicated, improvised appearance.
a Rube Goldberg arrangement of flasks and test tubes.
deviously complex and impractical.
a Rube Goldberg scheme for reducing taxes.
A “Rube Goldberg contraption” is a machine with many apparently extraneous parts, which appears to have been designed by patchwork.
1955–60; after Rube ( Reuben ) Goldberg
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
This, of course, is an example of a Rube Goldberg machine—an overly complex mechanism that performs a simple task.
From Barron's • May 14, 2026
After that fall, each bout of sickness or medical procedure causes a cruel chain reaction, like a diabolical Rube Goldberg machine.
From The Wall Street Journal • Oct. 10, 2025
When ARID1A is mutated, a microscopic chain of events analogous to a Rube Goldberg machine is set off in the cancer cell.
From Science Daily • May 15, 2024
“Fall River Fishing,” written by Zuzanna Szadkowski and Deborah Knox, who also star, is a Rube Goldberg machine of a play: an entertaining spectacle of seemingly disparate parts that are actually interconnected.
From New York Times • Feb. 28, 2023
Cells of all sorts are commonly likened to biochemical factories, busy ferments in which dozens of mechanisms are working away in complex sequences that are half Rube Goldberg, half ballet.
From "1491" by Charles C. Mann
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
