rabbit warren
- noun
- /ˈræbɪt ˈwɔːrən/
:
túneles de conejo
- The wildlife experts studied the complex structure of the rabbit warren to understand their behaviors.
Examples
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During our hike, we spotted several entrances to a rabbit warren beneath the bushes.
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There were still rabbit warren worlds like Colsar, where Conek had been born, but most were sparsely settled, dependent on freighters to ship in trade goods and ship out the homegrown products.
Fiction book (1991) -
The garden was filled with holes, indicating there was a rabbit warren nearby.
Synonyms
2
6.3
A group of connected underground tunnels where rabbits live
How Extensive
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase builds directly from the literal image of a 'warren' of rabbits (a maze-like network of burrows), so a learner who knows 'rabbit' and 'warren' can readily infer the metaphorical extension to a cramped, maze-like residential area. The compositional mapping from the constituents to the figurative meaning is straightforward and cross-linguistically motivated, making the expression transparent to B1 learners who know both words.
Etymology
Rabbit warren originally named the real homes of rabbits: a 'warren' is a group of burrows and tunnels where many rabbits live close together, so the phrase means 'a network of underground tunnels'.