haystack

[hey-stak]

noun

1. a stack of hay with a conical or ridged top, built up in the mowed field so as to prevent the accumulation of moisture and promote drying.

haystack

/ ˈheɪˌrɪk, ˈheɪˌstæk /

noun

1. a large pile of hay, esp one built in the open air and covered with thatch

Word History and Origins

Origin of haystack¹

1425–75; late Middle English. See hay, stack

Idioms and Phrases

see needle in a haystack.

Example Sentences

The messages, sent in 2018 and 2019—and up until the day before Epstein’s arrest—were needles in a roughly 20,000-page haystack of Epstein documents released by a House committee last week.

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“You were a needle in a haystack, to be sure!”

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“Are merely the haystack. Designed to engage all our attention and make the needle within impossible to see.”

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"It's like looking for a needle in a haystack," Pavia said.

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“What you must realize,” he wrote to his first wife, Mary, “is that once I begin a story you become a character, not a person; Monet’s haystacks didn’t complain that they weren’t really purple.”

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