quicksand
- a bed of soft or loose sand saturated with water and having considerable depth, yielding under weight and therefore tending to suck down any object resting on its surface.
Origin of quicksand
Related Words for quicksand
quagmire, peril, risk, danger, snag, difficulty, drawback, morass, quicksand, bait, ploy, ambush, device, net, ruse, pitfall, goo, swamp, fen, dirtExamples from the Web for quicksand
Contemporary Examples of quicksand
To Herron it has felt like “a marathon that I ran in quicksand, getting nowhere quickly.”
Caught Between Military and Civilian Justice, a Battered Wife Waits and Waits for HelpJacob Siegel
April 21, 2014
The McKesson proxy statement is 100-plus pages of quicksand.
Five minutes later, he is up to his thighs in liquid that is quicksand thick.
An emaciated Steve Jobs jiving from an underground lair about his health is quicksand.
Historical Examples of quicksand
That green strip of willow is the edge of a quicksand where no one knows the depth.
The Treasure TrailMarah Ellis Ryan
The boys will think a quicksand has swallowed us, and no one will be sleeping there at Soledad.
The Treasure TrailMarah Ellis Ryan
In some places it seemed as bottomless as a pit of quicksand.
War from the InsideFrederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
She had married the solid Hermie, and he had turned out to be quicksand.
GigoloEdna Ferber
You never know where you'll meet a quicksand, or a hole in the ice.
The MermaidLily Dougall
quicksand
- a deep mass of loose wet sand that submerges anything on top of it
Word Origin and History for quicksand
quicksand
- A deep bed of loose, smoothly rounded sand grains, saturated with water and forming a soft, shifting mass that yields easily to pressure and tends to engulf objects resting on its surface. Although it is possible for a person to drown while mired in quicksand, the human body is less dense than any quicksand and is thus not drawn or sucked beneath the surface as is sometimes popularly believed.