labyrinth
n.a complicated system of paths or tunnels that is very easy to get lost in. It can also describe a confusing situation with many difficult rules.
n.a complex system of interconnected paths or passages through which it is difficult to find one's way. Often used figuratively to describe intricate or confusing organizational structures.
“The old city is a labyrinth of narrow streets.”
“New employees often find it difficult to navigate the labyrinth of corporate bureaucracy during their first month.”
“The ancient palace was designed as a literal labyrinth to protect the treasury, featuring dead ends and hidden doors that baffled even the most determined intruders.”
Often used with the preposition 'of' to describe the components of the maze.
“I found Cachette, a labyrinth of farm buildings, workshops and courtyards a little over-familiar, but Lotus, a larger harbourside map, brought in some interesting long-range combat.”
On Crete, in the days of King Minos, there was a secret that had to be hidden where no eye could find it. The queen had borne a monster: the Minotaur, a creature with the body of a man and the head of a bull, that fed on human flesh and could not be allowed to roam free.
So Minos summoned the cleverest craftsman alive, an inventor named Daedalus, and set him an impossible task. Build me a prison, the king said, from which nothing can ever escape. Build me something no one can walk out of.
Daedalus built the Labyrinth: a maze of stone passages that folded back on themselves, corridors that branched and doubled and led nowhere, turnings so cunning that anyone loosed inside would wander until they starved. It was so intricate that Daedalus himself, the very man who designed it, could barely find his own way out again.
Into that maze the Minotaur was shut, and every few years young men and women were sent in as tribute, to be lost in the dark and devoured. It ended only when Theseus came with a ball of thread to unwind behind him, and walked back out alive by following the one line that told him the way.
From that terrible, ingenious maze we get the word labyrinth. We use it now for any structure so twisting and complicated that you can lose yourself in it, and just as often for the tangled and abstract kind — a labyrinth of rules, of streets, of paperwork you cannot find your way through.
Original etymology written by Shinotoshi Nakamura.
Daedalus' craft, the Minotaur's maze, and a boy who flew too high.
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Ariadne's thread (idiom)
A method or clue that guides you safely through a confusing, complicated problem.
the clue out of the maze
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caught in a labyrinth (idiom)
Trapped in a situation so complicated and confusing that there seems to be no way out.
lost in the maze
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the wings of Icarus (idiom)
Bold ambition that reaches too far and ends in a sudden, dramatic fall.
the escape by air
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fly too close to the sun (idiom)
To be so ambitious that you overreach and bring about your own downfall.
the fatal ascent