magpie's nest
- noun
- Informal
:
nido de urraca
- The garage has become a magpie's nest of tools, boxes, and forgotten projects.
Examples
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After a week without cleaning, the living room looked like a magpie's nest.
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Her handbag is such a magpie's nest that she can never find anything in it.
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Her room looks like a magpie's nest!
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The garage is a complete magpie's nest.
-
After a week without cleaning, the living room looked like a magpie's nest.
-
The garage has become a magpie's nest of tools, boxes, and forgotten projects.
-
Her handbag is such a magpie's nest that she can never find anything in it.
Synonyms
41
3.6
Things left around in an untidy way
2
6.8
A very messy place with many things mixed together
How Messy
Surface Forms
Morphology
magpie's + nest
While 'nest' clearly signals a place and 'magpie' specifies the owner, the idiomatic sense of a cluttered or hoarded collection relies on knowledge that magpies are stereotypically collectors of objects. This connection is inferable for learners who know that behaviour but is metaphorical and culturally specific rather than strictly compositional, so the expression is only partly predictable.
Etymology
Magpie's nest comes from the bird magpie, which likes to collect shiny things and put them into a messy nest. So, a place that is full of different items and looks 'untidy' or 'cluttered' is called a magpie's nest.