wheels within wheels

Idioms  

1. Complex interacting processes, agents, or motives, as in It's difficult to find out just which government agency is responsible; there are wheels within wheels. This term, which now evokes the complex interaction of gears, may derive from a scene in the Bible (Ezekiel 1:16): “Their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel.” [c. 1600]

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Example Sentences

There is often talk of wheels within wheels in Pakistan; intricate power dynamics and moves, alliances and grudges.

From BBC • Feb. 9, 2024

As with nearly everything he wrote, there’s a sense of wheels within wheels.

From New York Times • Jul. 25, 2022

As walls are directed into place simultaneously in clockwise and counterclockwise directions, the sense of a city in conspiratorial motion — of a metropolis of wheels within wheels — is conveyed.

From Washington Post • Jul. 12, 2018

One answer is to integrate them into circular economies — wheels within wheels.

From Nature • Mar. 22, 2016

“Never before have there been so many wheels within wheels in the Scythedom.”

From "Scythe" by Neal Shusterman

Related Words

• arduous
• convoluted
• difficult
• fancy
• hard
• intricate
• knotty
• perplexing
• problematic
• sophisticated
• troublesome