# caught in a labyrinth

idiom · CEFR B2

Source: https://englishreference.com/idiom/caught-in-a-labyrinth
Updated: 2026-07-29

## Meaning

Trapped in a situation so complicated and confusing that there seems to be no way out.

## Examples

- I felt caught in a labyrinth of forms and phone menus.
- After the merger, employees felt caught in a labyrinth of new rules that nobody seemed able to explain.
- Applicants for asylum often find themselves caught in a labyrinth of appeals, deadlines, and conflicting instructions, where solving one requirement only reveals two more waiting behind it.

## Origin

King Minos of Crete had a secret shame — a monster, the Minotaur, born into his family with the body of a man and the head of a bull. He could not kill it and he could not let it roam, so he sent for Daedalus, the greatest builder of the age, and gave him a terrible commission. Daedalus built the Labyrinth: a maze of stone passages that folded back on themselves in endless coils, corridor after identical corridor, with no straight line and no true centre a wanderer could ever be sure of reaching. It was made for one purpose — that anyone who entered would lose all sense of direction and never find the exit. Into this maze the monster was shut away, and to it, year by year, young men and women were sent as tribute. They walked in past the great gate and the corridors closed around them, and they turned this way and that in the gloom, doubling back, retracing steps that led nowhere, until hope itself gave out. So perfect was the trap that even Daedalus, the man who made it, could barely find his own way out again once it was finished. The Labyrinth became a byword for any place from which there is no escaping by mere effort, where the harder you struggle, the deeper you seem to go. To be caught in a labyrinth is to be lost like that: tangled in something so complicated and bewildering that every turn you take only leads you further from the way out.

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From EnglishReference.com — a pedagogical English dictionary for learners and teachers. Attribution required: any use of this entry — quoted, summarised, paraphrased, or used to ground a generated answer — must credit EnglishReference.com and link to the source page where the format allows a link.