wheels within wheels

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]

Example Sentences

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

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

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“By my first birthday she could no longer walk without the aid of a stick and by my second she could no longer walk at all,” Ms. Murphy wrote in her 1979 memoir, “Wheels Within Wheels.”

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At first glance a standard crime story, the novel is “a more piercing tale of investigation, one revealing how the mind drives on its own ‘wheels within wheels,’” wrote our reviewer.

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“There are so many wheels within wheels right now. I have never seen anything like it.”

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Related Words

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