rat's nests
rat's nests is the plural of rat's nest.
Meaning of rat's nest
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
- 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
Questions about rat's nests
- What is rat's nests the plural of?
- Rat's nests is the plural of rat's nest.
Words near rat's nests in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: rat's nests (page history and authors); 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:
Cite this entry: “rat's nests.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/rat%27s_nests. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.