needle in a haystack

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.

Dr Harry Bennett, an expert in maritime history, said the dive team had found "the underwater archaeological equivalent of a needle in a haystack".

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“In this economy, finding full-time employment is like finding a needle in a haystack,” said 25-year-old Niya Doyle, one of the people Ehrenkranz profiled for her newsletter.

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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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needleful needlepoint

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