- 1灌木叢、樹叢（密到走不進去的那種）；引申用法「一團亂麻」，例如 a thicket of rules 就是繁瑣糾纏的規定。
A thicket is a patch of bushes and small trees growing so close together that you cannot easily walk through it. The key idea is not size but density: a thicket may be only a few metres across, but it is packed. A forest you walk in; a thicket you push through, or go around. Animals like thickets for exactly that reason — a rabbit or a deer disappears into one and is safe.
The word is a little literary. In everyday speech people are more likely to say 'the bushes' or 'all those trees over there'; 'thicket' turns up in novels, nature writing, and hiking descriptions. It is countable: a thicket, thickets. You often see it with 'of' — a thicket of bamboo, a thicket of thorns.
English also uses it as a picture for anything tangled and hard to get through, and that use is common in newspapers: a thicket of rules, a thicket of wires behind the TV, a thicket of legal problems. Here it keeps the same feeling — not 'a lot of', but 'so many, so tangled, that moving forward is hard'. If you understand the bushes, you understand the metaphor for free.
組成thick (dense, closely packed) + the old English noun ending -et. Note that -et here is not the 'small' -et you see in some borrowed French words; it simply makes a noun naming a place where the quality is found. German has the same idea in Dickicht.
原始詞典資料3 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
thicketnoun/ˈθɪkɪt/
- 1
A dense, but generally small, growth of shrubs, bushes or small trees; a copse.
- Suddenly from a lumpy tussock of old grass some twenty yards in front of them, with black-tipped ears erect and long hinder limbs throwing it forward, started a hare. It bolted for a thicket of alders.
- 2
A dense aggregation of other things, concrete or abstract.
- He had to complete a thicket of paperwork before he was allowed to join the company.
- Hidden behind thickets of acronyms and gorse bushes of detail, a new great game is under way across the globe. Some call it geoeconomics, but it's geopolitics too. The current power play consists of an extraordinary range of countries simultaneously sitting down to negotiate big free trade and investment agreements.
- 3
computingengineeringmathematicsThe collection of many small linked files created when a document is saved in HTML format by some word processors and web site creation software.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。