mizmaze

mizmaze (plural mizmazes)

1. (archaic, also figurative) A maze or labyrinth.
   • 1898 February, Kate Kingsley Ide, “The Primary Social Settlement”, in Popular Science Monthly:

     In the perplexing mizmaze of the modern residence, in the undue attention to the multiplex mysteries of the modern wardrobe, in the multiform engagements of the modern individual, the family is losing its identity.

   • 1918, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Tanglewood tales, The Minotaur:

     So the young man took the end of the silken string in his left hand, and his gold-hiked sword, ready drawn from its scabbard, in the other, and trod boldly into the inscrutable labyrinth. How this labyrinth was built is more than I can tell you, but so cunningly contrived a mizmaze was never seen in the world, before nor since. There can be nothing else so intricate, unless it were the brain of a man like Dædalus, who planned it, or the heart of any ordinary man

2. (archaic) A state of bewilderment.
   • 1922, Mazo de la Roche, Explorers of the Dawn, Chapter 7:

     "Not a bit of it," responded our friend. "They come along so fast that I was all in a mizmaze trying to keep track on 'em. […] "

• “mizmaze”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.