NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK Definition & Meaning

needle in a haystack

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Idioms and Phrases

An item that is very hard or impossible to locate, as in Looking for that screw in Dean's workshop amounts to looking for a needle in a haystack . Originating in the early 1500s, with meadow instead of haystack , this metaphor exists in many other languages as well.

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Example Sentences

Examples have not been reviewed.

She was confronted with a fresh list of roughly 500 names, and, in her words, a new search for "a needle in a haystack".

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Spotting the small genetic changes in that code which occur over a few generations, for example, as a result of new arrivals interbreeding with the local population, is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

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"This problem is equivalent to finding a needle in a haystack, since we are trying to find a few unknown wells that are scattered in the midst of many more documented wells," said Charuleka Varadharajan, a scientist at Berkeley Lab and senior author of the study.

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Mr Howells' barrister also argued that the search for the hard drive would not be "a needle in a haystack case".

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“I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is a needle in a haystack,’” she remembers.

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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

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