Word.ws English Dictionary

opened Pandora's box

opened Pandora's box is the simple past and past participle of open Pandora's box.

Meaning of open Pandora's box

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

Questions about opened Pandora's box

What is opened Pandora's box the simple past and past participle of?
Opened Pandora's box is the simple past and past participle of open Pandora's box.

Words near opened Pandora's box in the dictionary

  1. opened one's heart
  2. opened one's legs
  3. opened one's mind
  4. opened one's mouth
  5. opened out
  6. opened Pandora's box
  7. opened someone's eyes
  8. opened the ball
  9. opened the batting
  10. opened the door
  11. opened the floodgates

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: opened Pandora's box (page history and authors); 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: “opened Pandora's box.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/opened_pandora%27s_box. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.