A.Word.A.Day --rabbit hole

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Aug 4, 2025

This week’s theme
Lewis Carroll

This week’s words
rabbit hole

Recreation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in Piccadilly Circus, London

Photo: Valerie Hinojosa

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Misc words

A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

Maybe you’ve won a Nobel Prize. Or an Olympic gold.

Or both (If so, congratulations! You’ve achieved Peak Overachiever. Mom must be ecstatic.)

But here’s a different kind of feat: Have you ever coined a word that actually made it into a dictionary?

If yes, I bow in your general direction and offer a freshly coined word in your honor: lexicongratulations.

To put it in perspective:
Each year, about a dozen people win a Nobel.
Each Olympics, around a thousand athletes win gold.
But how many people can say they’ve added a word to the language?

Lewis Carroll did it. Dozens of times.

From chortle to outgrabe, his coinages live on. Some nonsense, some surprisingly useful, all delightfully inventive. We’ve featured some of his creations in the past. This week, we tumble once again down the Carrollian rabbit hole.

And now it’s your turn: Have you coined a word? We’d love to see it. It may not end up in Oxford, but it might end up in our hearts, and inbox. Share your word on our website or email us at words@wordsmith.org. Be sure to include your location (city, state).

Important: Before you send your lexical gem, give it a quick Google. Someone else may have already had your brillig idea.

PS: If you’re a Nobel laureate or Olympic gold medalist and you’ve coined a word, please drop us a line. We may faint, but we’ll recover, eventually. If you meet two out of three criteria, we still want to hear from you. Seriously, any one of the three is lovely. Drop us a line.

rabbit hole

PRONUNCIATION:

(RAB-it hohl)

MEANING:

noun:
1. A bizarre, confusing, or disorienting situation that’s hard to exit.
2. A lengthy and often unproductive detour, especially one involving a series of tangents (as in online browsing).

ETYMOLOGY:

From the rabbit hole into which Alice falls in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). The term was first used literally, for an entrance to a rabbit warren in 1667, and metaphorically from 1938.

NOTES:

In Carroll’s story, the rabbit hole is the gateway to Wonderland, a realm of logic-defying oddities. Today, going down a rabbit hole can mean falling into a world of confusion or simply getting sucked into an unexpectedly deep dive, whether into conspiracy theories, cat videos, or Wikipedia browsing.

USAGE:

“[Andy Puddicombe] ended up going down a contemplative rabbit hole, dedicating his life to meditation, writing poetry, and living in a cave.”
Elizabeth Widdicombe; The Higher Life; The New Yorker; Jul 6, 2015.

See more usage examples of rabbit hole in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

Appealing to tribe, appealing to fear, pitting one group against another, telling people that order and security will be restored if it weren't for those who don't look like us or don't sound like us or don't pray like we do, that's an old playbook. It's as old as time. And in a healthy democracy it doesn't work. Our antibodies kick in, and people of goodwill from across the political spectrum call out the bigots and the fearmongers, and work to compromise and get things done and promote the better angels of our nature. -Barack Obama, 44th US President (b. 4 Aug 1961)

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