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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Rat's nest

Meaning

Noun