rat's nest

plural rat's nests

1. idiomaticSomething that is excessively complicated, entangled, or disorderly (either physically or metaphorically).

   rat's nest of a wiring harness

   3 more examples

   To make this mid-17th-century rat's nest of love affairs and sexual confusions intelligible for late-20th-century audiences is a job in itself.

   1990 May 22, Bernard Holland, “Opera: A 17th-Century Rarity, Cesti's 'Dori'”, in New York Times, retrieved 02 Mar 2017

   That has been held up by the need to negotiate the distribution rights for each country with the labels and artists—a rat's nest of contracts.

   2003 November 1, Charles Arthur, “This is the sound of the future”, in Independent, UK, retrieved 02 Mar 2017

   Faced with that rat's nest of legal and jurisdictional issues, the NLRB threw the Northwestern players' labor rights under the team bus.

   2015 August 26, “Editorial: Why can't college athletes unionize?”, in Los Angeles Times, retrieved 02 Mar 2017

   Synonyms: mare's nest

   1. idiomaticcomputingA software or hardware system whose design lacks organized structure, making it difficult to understand and maintain.

      2016 July 2, veryatlantic, "Saturday, July 2, 2016: Addendum," Tales From The Trailer Court™ (retrieved 2 March 2017):

      3 more examples

      Many CPU silicon designers in the 1990s complained bitterly about the rat's nest in the center of SPARC chips.

      2002 January 14, Jim Turley, “Embedded Processors, Part Two”, in PC Magazine, retrieved 02 Mar 2017

      And cloud computing relies on millions of connections and services. In other words, it's a troubleshooting nightmare when the cloud goes bust. . . . In other words, the cloud will likely become more of a rat's nest.

      2008 July 21, Larry Dignan, “Amazon's S3 outage: Is the cloud too complicated?”, in ZDNet, retrieved 02 Mar 2017

      Think of libraries as the way the sub-idiots who like C code hide all the rat's-nest programming they don't want you to see.

      Synonyms: mare's nest