Definition of "saturnalia"

a man who mounts the Hustings, must not allow himself to be sore-boned, or he invites his opponents to 'touch him on the raw,' not in the exercise of their malice, but their power; an election is a saturnalia."

1842, [anonymous collaborator of Letitia Elizabeth Landon], chapter LXX, in Lady Anne Granard; or, Keeping up Appearances. […], volume III, London: Henry Colburn, […], page 260

They lodged men and women on the same floor; and with the night there began a saturnalia of debauchery—scenes such as never before had been witnessed in America.

1905, Upton Sinclair, chapter XXVI, in The Jungle, New York, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, published 26 February 1906

If at the birth of the Latin kings their fathers were really unknown, the fact points either to a general looseness of life in the royal family or to a special relaxation of moral rules on certain occasions, when men and women reverted for a season to the licence of an earlier age. Such Saturnalias are not uncommon at some stages of social evolution.

1922, James Frazer, chapter 14, in The Golden Bough

Yet if he remained, it would simply mean that his own and Hagthorpe's crews would join in the saturnalia and increase the hideousness of events now inevitable.

1922, Rafael Sabatini, chapter XXVIII, in Captain Blood: His Odyssy

It was a raw, violent, guzzling saturnalia that spilled obstreperously through the woods to the officers' club and spread up into the hills toward the hospital and the antiaircraft-gun emplacements.

1961, Joseph Heller, chapter 34, in Catch-22

We advanced into the main hall, already aroar with a saturnalia of sozzled gestures and gibbering.

2001, Chip Kidd, The Cheese Monkeys