rat's nest

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English

Pronunciation

Noun

rat's nest (plural rat's nests)

  2. (idiomatic) Something that is excessively complicated, entangled, or disorderly (either physically or metaphorically).
    Synonym: mare's nest
    rat's nest of a wiring harness
    • 1990 May 22, Bernard Holland, “Opera: A 17th-Century Rarity, Cesti's 'Dori'”, in New York Times, retrieved 2 March 2017:
      To make this mid-17th-century rat's nest of love affairs and sexual confusions intelligible for late-20th-century audiences is a job in itself.
    • 2003 November 1, Charles Arthur, “This is the sound of the future”, in Independent, UK, retrieved 2 March 2017:
      That has been held up by the need to negotiate the distribution rights for each country with the labels and artists—a rat's nest of contracts.
    • 2015 August 26, “Editorial: Why can't college athletes unionize?”, in Los Angeles Times, retrieved 2 March 2017:
      Faced with that rat's nest of legal and jurisdictional issues, the NLRB threw the Northwestern players' labor rights under the team bus.
    1. (idiomatic, computing, often hyphenated when used attributively) A software or hardware system whose design lacks organized structure, making it difficult to understand and maintain.
      • 2002 January 14, Jim Turley, “Embedded Processors, Part Two”, in PC Magazine, retrieved 2 March 2017:
        Many CPU silicon designers in the 1990s complained bitterly about the rat's nest in the center of SPARC chips.
      • 2008 July 21, Larry Dignan, “Amazon's S3 outage: Is the cloud too complicated?”, in ZDNet, retrieved 2 March 2017:
        And cloud computing relies on millions of connections and services. In other words, it's a troubleshooting nightmare when the cloud goes bust. . . . In other words, the cloud will likely become more of a rat's nest.
      • 2016 July 2, veryatlantic, "Saturday, July 2, 2016: Addendum," Tales From The Trailer Court™ (retrieved 2 March 2017):
      Think of libraries as the way the sub-idiots who like C code hide all the rat's-nest programming they don't want you to see.

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