What it means
A rabbit hole is that slippery internet spiral where a quick look turns into hours of clicking, scrolling, and learning oddly specific rubbish. You start on one sensible link and end up at 2am reading about Victorian drainage or watching niche videos. The phrase nods to Alice in Wonderland, and it’s a proper time thief, even when it’s weirdly satisfying.
Usage examples
"I popped online after tea for a biscuit recipe, fell down a rabbit hole, and two hours later I’m watching a bloke in Leeds build a pallet bunker."
"Started searching for the recipe of my gran sticky toffee pudding on a Sunday afternoon, ended up three hours later in a rabbit hole about the history of British dessert vocabulary, complete with footnotes about Victorian sugar trade and the Boer war."
"My partner asked me a single question about the moon landing during dinner, I disappeared into a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, scientific rebuttals and old Apollo programme footage, and emerged at one in the morning with the chips long since gone cold."
"I only opened Reddit to check one thing and next minute I was in a full rabbit hole about abandoned malls in Ohio."
"Don’t send me that video unless you want me vanishing down a rabbit hole till stupid o’clock."
Where it comes from
It comes straight from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland from 1865, where Alice literally drops down a rabbit hole into a strange upside down world. That image later turned into a wider metaphor for getting pulled deeper and deeper into something, and online life gave it a whole new turbo mode.
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