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

Synonyms

• dilemma
• predicament
• pickle
• hole
• bind
• swamp
• corner

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

But there’s something about politics that gets me in a rabbit hole. —Carl Lamarre, Billboard, 3 Sep. 2025

Are any of these characters real, or just in the imagination of a crumbling gambler falling deeper into the rabbit hole à la Burt Lancaster’s slow mental breakdown in The Swimmer? —Pete Hammond, Deadline, 30 Aug. 2025

That moment led me down a rabbit hole of research into what laughter actually does to the body and brain. —Sadhna Bokhiria, Forbes.com, 22 Aug. 2025

Press reports had abounded of people — including a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who backed OpenAI — who appeared to have spiraled into delusional thinking after starting a conversation with ChatGPT about an innocuous topic like the nature of truth, before going down a dark rabbit hole. —Parmy Olson, Mercury News, 20 Aug. 2025

Word History

Etymology

from the rabbit hole that Alice enters in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland

First Known Use

1938, in the meaning defined above

Rhymes for rabbit hole

• amphibole
• asystole
• buttonhole
• casserole
• centriole
• decontrol
• glycerol
• metropole
• monopole
• multipole
• omeprazole
• oriole