Dictionary
Words, grammatical forms and meanings linked to the ontology.
rabbit holing en · NOUN
Meanings
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(uncountable) The act of becoming distracted by, side-tracked, or lost in a long chain of online searches, links, or topics that often lead one away from their original goal.
Meandering writing can still have a lot of good points, good ideas, eloquent prose, but it is not as powerful or captivating as focused writing. Reading your own articles can reveal to you the extent and style of your own rabbit holing. Give your rabbit holes a life of their own
2019 October 14, Marla Szwast, “How to Keep Your Writing Out of Rabbit Holes”, in The Writing Cooperative:Today’s popular phrase “going down the rabbit hole” describes something not really possible before the Internet. For me, the closest thing to rabbit-holing happened as I worked up a bibliography for a paper or something, checking the bibliographies of books on a specific topic, then moving from one book to another and yet another, weaving a web of references. To do that required switching from shelf to shelf in a well-stocked library.
2022 January 24, Cynthia D. Bertelsen, “Down the Rabbit Hole: Wandering through an Amazing Maze of Links”, in Gherkins & Tomatoes:One of the biggest advantages of Anki I’ve found is remembering my rabbit holes. Ankifying the knowledge I learn reduces that feeling, which gives me the psychological permission necessary to continue rabbit holing. [...] being able to go into new rabbit holes having perfect command of the insights from your previous ones let your knowledge compound in a way that makes traditional rabbit holing seem utterly useless.
2024 November 25, Saul Munn, “remembering your rabbit holes”, in Notion:After more years than I prefer to calculate, little matches the joy and super charge energy of a session of web rabbit holing, of hopping from one link to another, and finding something at the other end I might never have thought existed.
2026 May 12, Alan Levine, “The Best Holes of Curiosity”, in CogDog The Blog:Perhaps there is a distinction to be made between scrolling (that mindless haptic act of searching one swipe at a time) and rabbit-holing (where we are looking for something and just keep looking). [...] To be sure, Rabbit-holing can be its own form of avoidance but it is one rooted in curiosity, and discovery, to let our minds wander, and in doing so, see what wonder we might discover.
2024 May 14, Jeanne M. Lambin, Scrolling vs. Rabbit Holing:One thing that struck me about most of these activists was their heavy use of the internet. “I do my own research” has become a punchline for rabbit-holing into online misinformation, but these activists did their own research, and plenty of it, clicking and scrolling late into the night.
2025 September 30, Paul Spinrad, “Real-World Rabbit Holing”, in The Main Street Journal:
rabbit holing en · VERB
Meanings
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(form-of, gerund, participle, present) present participle and gerund of rabbit hole