Word.ws English Dictionary

open Pandora's box

open Pandora's box verb: to perform an action that causes problems to appear which did not exist beforehand, or were not known about prior.

Verb

open Pandora's box (third-person singular simple present opens Pandora's box, present participle opening Pandora's box, simple past and past participle opened Pandora's box)

  1. (idiomatic) To perform an action that causes problems to appear which did not exist beforehand, or were not known about prior.
    • It’s a thin line between charming, candy-flavored verisimilitude and craven commercialism, and if Spielberg ultimately stayed on the right side of it, “E.T.” nevertheless helped open a Pandora’s box of product placement.2022 August 4, Adam Nayman, “Five Sci-Fi Classics, One Summer: How 1982 Shaped Our Present”, in The New York Times

Forms of open Pandora's box

third-person singular presentopens Pandora's box
present participleopening Pandora's box
past participleopened Pandora's box
pastopened Pandora's box

Questions about open Pandora's box

What does open Pandora's box mean?
Open Pandora's box means to perform an action that causes problems to appear which did not exist beforehand, or were not known about prior.
What part of speech is open Pandora's box?
Open Pandora's box is a verb.
What is the past tense of open Pandora's box?
The past tense of open Pandora's box is opened Pandora's box.

Words near open Pandora's box in the dictionary

  1. open one's mouth
  2. open order
  3. open out
  4. open outcry
  5. open outsourcing
  6. open Pandora's box
  7. open play
  8. open position
  9. open positions
  10. open prison
  11. open prisons

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: open Pandora's box (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “open Pandora's box.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/open_pandora%27s_box. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.