mare's-nest
Americannoun
-
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
And at week's end the Allis-Chalmers dispute was still a mare's-nest.
From Time Magazine Archive
In the 22 hours that followed, the world press collected a mare's-nest of wild reports from Apia.
From Time Magazine Archive
It looked as if he had stumbled into a mare's-nest.
From The Voice in the Fog by Harold MacGrath
Yet suppose, after all, I had found a mare’s-nest!
From My Friend Smith A Story of School and City Life by Talbot Baines Reed
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.
