rabbit hole

noun

: a complexly bizarre or difficult state or situation conceived of as a hole into which one falls or descends

I wanted to show this woman descending into the rabbit hole: this loss of self, becoming a servant to her job and to the work.—

Jessica Chastain

especially : one in which the pursuit of something (such as an answer or solution) leads to other questions, problems, or pursuits

While trying to find the picture again on Google, I fell down the Cosmo rabbit hole, scrolling through a gallery of swimwear, then through "How to Be Sexier-Instantly" and then through all 23 slides of "Sexy Ideas for Long Hair." —

Edith Zimmerman

Because it is so early on in this work it is easy to say that we are either at the edge of a remarkable new and useful science or that we are careering down an environmental rabbit hole. —

Jack Hitt

In the season-two premiere of HBO's Westworld, viewers were again tossed down a rabbit hole filled with theories, where one open door leads to many more closed ones. —

Josh Wigler and Zoe Haylock

Examples of rabbit hole in a Sentence

shoreline residents are finding themselves helplessly falling down a rabbit hole in their Sisyphean efforts to halt beach erosion

Recent Examples on the Web

Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to show current usage. Read More Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

Here are some of my favorite ways to avoid going down the rabbit hole. —

Aytekin Tank, Forbes, 9 Jan. 2025 Ultimately, my journey down the rabbit hole of ostrich emissions convinced me that parsing the relative virtues of different types of meat might be beside the point. —

Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic, 8 Jan. 2025 Many of these gems use an element of the holidays as a mere jumping-off point before plunging down some other rabbit hole. —

Joe Berkowitz, Vulture, 15 Dec. 2024 Both DLCs offer up the same kind of cold dread that Alan Wake 2 offered and continue to showcase game creator and director Sam Lake’s exploration of what video games are capable of narratively and how far players are willing to follow him down the rabbit hole. —

Richard Newby, TIME, 5 Dec. 2024 See all Example Sentences for rabbit hole