rat's nest
rat's nest noun: something that is excessively complicated, entangled, or disorderly (either physically or metaphorically).
Noun
rat's nest (plural rat's nests)
- Something that is excessively complicated, entangled, or disorderly (either physically or metaphorically).
- rat's nest of a wiring harness
- To make this mid-17th-century rat's nest of love affairs and sexual confusions intelligible for late-20th-century audiences is a job in itself.1990 May 22, Bernard Holland, “Opera: A 17th-Century Rarity, Cesti's 'Dori'”, in New York Times, retrieved 02 Mar 2017
- Synonyms:
- mare's nest
- A software or hardware system whose design lacks organized structure, making it difficult to understand and maintain.
- Many CPU silicon designers in the 1990s complained bitterly about the rat's nest in the center of SPARC chips.2002 January 14, Jim Turley, “Embedded Processors, Part Two”, in PC Magazine, retrieved 02 Mar 2017
- And cloud computing relies on millions of connections and services. In other words, it's a troubleshooting nightmare when the cloud goes bust. . . . In other words, the cloud will likely become more of a rat's nest.2008 July 21, Larry Dignan, “Amazon's S3 outage: Is the cloud too complicated?”, in ZDNet, retrieved 02 Mar 2017
Examples of rat's nest in a sentence
- That has been held up by the need to negotiate the distribution rights for each country with the labels and artists—a rat's nest of contracts.2003 November 1, Charles Arthur, “This is the sound of the future”, in Independent, UK, retrieved 02 Mar 2017:
- Faced with that rat's nest of legal and jurisdictional issues, the NLRB threw the Northwestern players' labor rights under the team bus.2015 August 26, “Editorial: Why can't college athletes unionize?”, in Los Angeles Times, retrieved 02 Mar 2017:
Synonyms of rat's nest
Forms of rat's nest
| plural | rat's nests |
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Questions about rat's nest
- What does rat's nest mean?
- Rat's nest means something that is excessively complicated, entangled, or disorderly (either physically or metaphorically).
- How do you use rat's nest in a sentence?
- That has been held up by the need to negotiate the distribution rights for each country with the labels and artists—a rat's nest of contracts.
- What part of speech is rat's nest?
- Rat's nest is a noun.
- What is the plural of rat's nest?
- The plural of rat's nest is rat's nests.
Words near rat's nest in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: rat's nest (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.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-rat's nest.ogg.
Cite this entry: “rat's nest.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/rat%27s_nest. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.