Meaning
To fall into a strange, surreal, or bewildering situation that swallows your attention and sense of time. Once associated with psychedelic or dreamlike experiences, it now mostly describes losing hours to an absorbing tangent, especially online browsing, clicking, or research. Informal to neutral; the tone ranges from playful self-mockery to genuine alarm, and the phrase usually follows go, fall, or disappear. Regional use: General English.
Origin
Lewis Carroll made Down the Rabbit-Hole the title of the first chapter of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), in which Alice chases a white rabbit and tumbles into a world where normal rules fail. Surprisingly, the OED's earliest citation predates Carroll: Jeremy Taylor's religious polemic of 1667 mentions rabbet holes - though that spelling may reflect the woodworking term rabbet, so it is a debatable ancestor. The modern figurative sense, which the OED says Carroll inspired, is first cited from the Yale Law Journal of 1938: 'It is the Rabbit-Hole down which we fell into the Law.' The internet era then turned the phrase into a byword for compulsive clicking and research tangents, a history Kathryn Schulz traced in a 2015 New Yorker essay; Merriam-Webster now glosses it as any complexly bizarre or difficult state one falls into.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- fall down the rabbit hole
- go down a rabbit hole
- rabbit hole
Usage Examples
- I looked up one recipe and fell down a rabbit hole of fermentation science; three hours vanished in a blink.
- Click any suggested video and you can slide down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories within the hour.
- Tax law is a rabbit hole; one murky clause leads to another until the whole afternoon has disappeared.