Word.ws English Dictionary

rabbit holing

rabbit holing noun: the act of becoming distracted by, side-tracked, or lost in a long chain of online searches, links, or topics that often lead one away from their original goal. Also the present participle and gerund of rabbit hole.

Noun

rabbit holing (uncountable)

  1. The act of becoming distracted by, side-tracked, or lost in a long chain of online searches, links, or topics that often lead one away from their original goal.
    • Meandering writing can still have a lot of good points, good ideas, eloquent prose, but it is not as powerful or captivating as focused writing. Reading your own articles can reveal to you the extent and style of your own rabbit holing. Give your rabbit holes a life of their own2019 October 14, Marla Szwast, “How to Keep Your Writing Out of Rabbit Holes”, in The Writing Cooperative
    • Today’s popular phrase “going down the rabbit hole” describes something not really possible before the Internet. For me, the closest thing to rabbit-holing happened as I worked up a bibliography for a paper or something, checking the bibliographies of books on a specific topic, then moving from one...2022 January 24, Cynthia D. Bertelsen, “Down the Rabbit Hole: Wandering through an Amazing Maze of Links”, in Gherkins & Tomatoes

Also used as

rabbit holing is also the present participle and gerund of rabbit hole.

Questions about rabbit holing

What does rabbit holing mean?
Rabbit holing means the act of becoming distracted by, side-tracked, or lost in a long chain of online searches, links, or topics that often lead one away from their original goal.
What part of speech is rabbit holing?
Rabbit holing is a noun.

Words near rabbit holing in the dictionary

  1. rabbit food
  2. rabbit foods
  3. rabbit foot
  4. rabbit hole
  5. rabbit holes
  6. rabbit holing
  7. rabbit hutch
  8. rabbit hutches
  9. rabbit in the headlamps
  10. rabbit in the headlights
  11. Rabbit Island

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rabbit holing (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: “rabbit holing.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/rabbit_holing. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.