word hole
- noun
- Informal
:
discurso confuso
- He realized halfway through the meeting that they had fallen into a word hole with no clear outcome.
Examples
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Her presentation quickly became a word hole as she lost her train of thought.
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This meeting has turned into a word hole.
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After an hour in that word hole, nobody remembered the original question.
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We fell into a word hole during the discussion.
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After an hour in that word hole, nobody remembered the original question.
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He realized halfway through the meeting that they had fallen into a word hole with no clear outcome.
-
Her presentation quickly became a word hole as she lost her train of thought.
Synonyms
13
5.5
A confused situation that is hard to understand or solve
5
7.3
Speech or writing that is unclear and hard to follow
1
7.5
A lack of clear, organized speech or writing that makes it hard to follow
A talk that jumps between topics and does not follow a clear idea
A situation when something is hard to understand
A statement that is hard to understand and makes people confused
Antonyms
Surface Forms
Morphology
The constituents 'word' (speech/language) and 'hole' (a gap or flaw) give a loose clue that the phrase involves a problem in discourse, so a learner might infer something about defective or problematic talk. However, the specific sense 'a confusing or unfocused discussion' is not directly or fully predictable from the parts and the expression is uncommon, so prior exposure would likely be needed for precise understanding.
Etymology
Word hole is a noun that may come from the image of a conversation where each word seems to fall into a hole and disappear, so people forget what to say. That's why it means 'a confusing or unfocused discussion'.