rabbit warren
- noun
- Informal
:
laberinto de calles
- The new apartment complex was so tightly packed that it felt like a rabbit warren, with hallways twisting and turning in every direction.
Examples
-
If they were heading into this rabbit warren of narrow lanes, he could not maintain visual contact without getting closer.
Fiction book (1991) -
As we navigated through the rabbit warren of small shops and narrow streets, I lost track of where we had started.
-
Finding your way in that rabbit warren of old buildings was challenging, as every corner looked the same.
Synonyms
3
8.1
A crowded area or building where many people live close together in poor conditions
2
6.8
A very messy place with many things mixed together
A confusing group of narrow winding streets that twist and turn
A street that winds a lot and makes it hard to find your way
Antonyms
How Confusing
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 came to describe crowded, maze-like places because old houses and narrow streets looked like the twisting tunnels of a rabbit warren, so it now means 'an overcrowded and confusing area'.