mare's-nest
Americannoun
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something imagined to be an extraordinary discovery but proving to be a delusion or a hoax.
The announced cure for the disease was merely another mare's-nest.
-
an extremely confused, entangled, or disordered place, situation, etc..
We just moved in, and the place is a mare's-nest.
noun
-
a discovery imagined to be important but proving worthless
-
a disordered situation
Etymology
Origin of mare's-nest
First recorded in 1610–20
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
The behavior Bezos describes in his blog post does, though, create a mare’s-nest of issues regarding the portions of the nonprosecution agreement in which AMI promised to cooperate fully with the government.
From Slate • Feb. 8, 2019
In the 22 hours that followed, the world press collected a mare's-nest of wild reports from Apia.
From Time Magazine Archive
And at week's end the Allis-Chalmers dispute was still a mare's-nest.
From Time Magazine Archive
We have deemed it simpler to go to the first Elizabethan phrase-book on our shelves, and that tiny volume, in its very first phrase, shatters the mare's-nest of Mrs. Pott, Mr. Donnelly, and Mr. Bucke.
From The Valet's tragedy, and other studies by Lang, Andrew
The machine that was growing in a mare's-nest on the second floor began to evolve faster.
From The Fourth R by Smith, George Oliver
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
