Word.ws English Dictionary

opening Pandora's box

opening Pandora's box is the present participle and gerund 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 opening Pandora's box

What is opening Pandora's box the present participle and gerund of?
Opening Pandora's box is the present participle and gerund of open Pandora's box.

Words near opening Pandora's box in the dictionary

  1. opening one's legs
  2. opening one's mind
  3. opening one's mouth
  4. Opening Opposition
  5. opening out
  6. opening Pandora's box
  7. opening sequence
  8. opening sequences
  9. opening someone's eyes
  10. opening speech
  11. opening speeches

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: opening 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: “opening Pandora's box.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/opening_pandora%27s_box. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.