Q: Having been sucked down many a “rabbit hole” in my reading, I’m wondering how this figurative sense of the phrase developed. Did it appear before Alice in Wonderland was published?
A: The phrase “rabbit hole” has been used both literally and figuratively for hundreds of years, well before Alice fell down one. Although you might have expected it to be used literally first, the earliest recorded usage seems to be figurative.
The first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary criticizes a religious writer who “makes breaches and Rabbet holes to pop in as he please” (A Dissuasive From Popery, 1667, by Jeremy Taylor, a Church of Ireland bishop).
The OED’s earliest literal example is from a 1705 description of Dunmore Cave in County Kilkenny, Ireland:
“The earth turned up at the entrance of a rabbit-hole” (The Works of George Berkeley, Vol. IV, 1871, edited by Alexander Campbell Fraser). Berkeley was a philosopher and Church of Ireland bishop.
So what was a rabbit burrow referred to before that? The usual term was “coney hole.” An adult rabbit used to be called a “coney” while a young one was a “rabbit.” (The OED says the term “coney” is now obsolete.)
The dictionary’s earliest “coney hole” example is from Hortus Vocabulorum (1500), a Latin-English glossary: “a conyes hole.”
The best-known literal example for “rabbit hole” is from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), by Lewis Carrol. In the novel, Alice follows a white rabbit “down a large rabbit-hole” into a magical world.
In the 20th century, the OED says, the children’s book inspired the use of “rabbit hole” in the modern figurative sense: “to indicate passage into a strange, surreal, or nonsensical situation or environment,” chiefly in the expression “down a (also the) rabbit hole.”
The dictionary’s first citation refers to a legal rabbit hole: “It is the Rabbit-Hole down which we fell into the Law, and to him who has gone down it, no queer performance is strange” (Yale Law Journal, 1938).
And we found this more recent example in a New York Times headline: “Going Down the Junk Food Rabbit Hole” (Oct. 27, 2025).
As for “rabbit,” it first appeared in Middle English in the 13th century, apparently derived from Anglo-Norman or Middle French.
The earliest Oxford citation is from John Trevisa’s translation of De Proprietatibus Rerum (“On the Properties of Things”), an encyclopedic Latin work compiled around 1240 by Bartholomeus Anglicus:
“Conynges … bringen forþ many rabettes & multiplien ful swiþe” (“Coneys … bring forth many rabbits and multiply very quickly”).
The first OED example for “coney” is from the Middle English of the late 12th century: “Ne sal þar ben foh, ne grai, ne cunin” (“There shall be no mottled [fur], nor grey [fur], nor coney [fur]”). From “Poema Morale” (circa 1175).
But if the words “coney” and “rabbit” didn’t turn up until Middle English, what was a rabbit called in Old English (roughly 450 to 1150)? As it turns out, the Anglo-Saxons didn’t have a word for the rabbit (whether old or young) because the animal was apparently unknown to them. Here’s how the OED explains this:
“Although there is archaeological evidence to suggest that rabbits existed in Britain before the last ice age and that some attempt may have been made to reintroduce them in the Roman period, the rabbit appears to have been unknown to the Anglo-Saxons, and only successfully re-established in Norman times.”
Any Anglo-Saxons who did somehow come across a rabbit might have referred to it as a “hare,” a larger herbivore of the genus Lepus that was common in Britain during the time of Beowulf.
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