Meaning

2 senses

  1. (Canada, US, countable, idiomatic, uncountable)A situation where problems or tasks keep reappearing repeatedly.

    Trying to get rid of spam e-mails is like whack-a-mole: as soon as you delete one, another appears.

  2. (Canada, US, countable, idiomatic, uncountable)A strategy of addressing recurrent, unpredictable problems in a piecemeal, temporary way at their point of emergence.

    der Kampf gegen die Hydra

Translations

1 languages
Deutsch
By meaning 1
practice of trying to stop problems, etc., that repeatedly occur in an apparently random manner; act of dealing with such matters in a piecemeal manner without achieving a complete solution:

Origin

From whack + a + mole (“a small, burrowing, insect-eating mammal of the family Talpidae”),

From whack + a + mole (“a small, burrowing, insect-eating mammal of the family Talpidae”), from the arcade game Whac-A-Mole which involves quickly and repeatedly hitting the heads of mechanical moles with a mallet as they pop up from holes. The name of the arcade game was coined in 1977 when it was first sold in the United States; the original game released in Japan in 1975 was called モグラ退治 (Mogura Taiji, literally “Mole Extermination”).

Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0 · source

Forms

plural: whack-a-moles

Lessons for this word

1 lessons

See also

neighbours in the dictionary
wetlandB1wetsuitwhackwhaleB1whaling
whack-a-mole — meaning, examples, forms, synonyms | Krumeto