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rabbit

[rab-it]

noun, plural -bits, (especially collectively) -bit for 1–3.

any of several soft-furred, large-eared, rodentlike burrowing mammals of the family Leporidae, allied with the hares and pikas in the order Lagomorpha, having a divided upper lip and long hind legs, usually smaller than the hares and mainly distinguished from them by bearing blind and furless young in nests rather than fully developed young in the open.

any of various small hares.

the fur of a rabbit or hare, often processed to imitate another fur.

Welsh rabbit.

a runner in a distance race whose goal is chiefly to set a fast pace, either to exhaust a particular rival so that a teammate can win or to help another entrant break a record; pacesetter.

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British Informal. a person who is poor at sports, especially golf, tennis, or cricket.

COLLAPSE

Idiom

pull a rabbit out of the hat, to find or obtain a sudden solution to a problem: Unless somebody pulls a rabbit out of the hat by next week, we'll be bankrupt.

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Rabbit is always a great word to know.

So is interrobang. Does it mean:

a calculus or concretion found in the stomach or intestines of certain animals, esp. ruminants, formerly reputed to be an effective remedy for poison.

a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question.

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Origin:
1375–1425; late Middle English rabet(te) young rabbit, bunny, probably < Old North French; compare Walloon robett, dialectal Dutch robbe

Related forms

rab·bit·like, rab·bit·y, adjective

Can be confused: rabbet, rabbit, rarebit, rebate.

Example Sentences

But venture inside and you'll see how far the rabbit hole goes.

It's a kind of magic act that works best when a student pulls the rabbit out of the hat.

I've had one rabbit die, and the other well, get sold accidentally.

EXPAND

But venture inside and you'll see how far the rabbit hole goes.

It's a kind of magic act that works best when a student pulls the rabbit out of the hat.

I've had one rabbit die, and the other well, get sold accidentally.

It may be the end of the road for an endangered species of rabbit.

The team has tested the lens by fitting it to a rabbit.

Make your garden greener with a lovely rabbit or a compost bin.

Clues as to how such a large rabbit could have evolved at all can be seen in the skull.

We've tumbled far, far down the organic rabbit hole.

The hat with the fake bottom, which conceals a rabbit.

Everybody running behind the unknown dark rabbit hole without knowing where he or she is running towards.

She starts off simple with a couple of hoppers, the frog and rabbit.

Season the rabbit with salt and pepper and place in a non-corrosive dish.

Their work built off of previous research that had successfully fertilized rabbit eggs in vitro.

The bunnies get into four outhouses and start making rabbit pellets.

Phillips touched briefly and humorously on the subject of rabbit holes and starting points.

They've created lab-grown collagen, artificial bladders and even reconstructed damaged rabbit penises.

Telltale's episodic videogame plops the homicidal rabbit and his canine pal back on the pop culture radar.

X's experiment produces new cells, the embryo will lose all traces of its rabbit origin.

European leaders may yet pull a rabbit out of the hat.

Whether acceptance of rabbit flesh denotes epicureanism or lack of discrimination in things comestible may be of small moment.

When you are writing your dissertation you end up pretty far down the rabbit hole.

Rabbit experts speculate that the suspect is a pet gone wild.

My backyard has rabbit tracks all over it, but that does not make my backyard the rabbit capital of the world.

But they lack charm as indoor antennasThose wiry contraptions commonly called rabbit ears clash against.

Mark does not pull dirty tricks or use rabbit punching rhetorical stunts.

Later, feast on island fare: venison and rabbit hot pot, seasonal salads from seaweed-composted garden.

He had run out of ammunition and shot a rabbit using a hard stick for a bullet.

He read about rabbit fever and hantavirus, and finally came to a category called relapsing tick.

They studied the color patterns the rabbit had that made it so damn hard to see, even when it's right in front of you.

Nutria meat, also called ragondin, is likened to rabbit or dark turkey meat.

Her website shows her hugging a stuffed white rabbit and playing dress-up.

Choose the degustation menu to sample signature dishes such as aubergine soufflé and rabbit strudel with porcini and poppy seed.

Tularemia is also called rabbit fever or deer fly fever because humans are often infected by animals.

COLLAPSE

Dictionary.com Unabridged

noun

John Cornelius (“Johnny”; “Rabbit”; “Jeep”), 1906–70, U.S. jazz saxophonist.

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2012.
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Link To rabbit

Collins

World English Dictionary

rabbit (ˈræbɪt)

—n , pl -bits, -bit
1.	any of various common gregarious burrowing leporid mammals, esp Oryctolagus cuniculus of Europe and North Africa and the cottontail of America. They are closely related and similar to hares but are smaller and have shorter ears
2.	the fur of such an animal
3.	informal (Brit) a novice or poor performer at a game or sport

—vb
4.	(intr) to hunt or shoot rabbits
5.	informal (Brit) (intr; often foll by on or away) to talk inconsequentially; chatter

[(sense 5) C20: from rhyming slang rabbit and pork talk]

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
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Etymonline

Word Origin & History

rabbit

late 14c., "young of the coney," from Fr. dialect (cf. Walloon robète), dim. of Flem. or M.Du. robbe "rabbit," of unknown origin. The adult was a coney (q.v.) until 18c.

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"Zoologically speaking, there are no native rabbits in the United States; they are all hares. But the early colonists, for some unknown reason, dropped the word hare out of their vocabulary, and it is rarely heard in American speech to this day. When it appears it is almost always applied to the so-called Belgian hare, which, curiously enough, is not a hare at all, but a true rabbit." [H.L. Mencken]

Rabbit punch "chop on the back of the neck" so called from resemblance to a gamekeeper's method of dispatching an injured rabbit. Rabbit's foot "good luck charm" first attested 1879, in U.S. Southern black culture. Pulling rabbits from a hat as a conjurer's trick is first recorded 1877.

COLLAPSE

American Heritage

Idioms & Phrases

rabbit

see pull (a rabbit) out of a hat.