Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun An intricate, usually confusing network of interconnecting pathways, as in a garden; a labyrinth.
  • noun A physical situation in which it is easy to get lost.
  • noun A graphic puzzle, the solution of which is an uninterrupted path through an intricate pattern of line segments from a starting point to a goal.
  • noun Something made up of many confused or conflicting elements; a tangle.
  • transitive verb To bewilder or astonish.
  • transitive verb To stupefy; daze.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Confusion of thought; perplexity; uncertainty; bewilderment.
  • noun Anything intended to confuse or mislead; a snare; a deception.
  • noun A wild fancy; a confused notion; an error.
  • noun A baffling and confusing network of paths or passages; a labyrinth: as, the maze of Hampton Court in England; a winding and turning; hence, a perplexed or embarrassing state of things; intricate disorder; entanglement: as, he found affairs all in a maze.
  • noun Wonder; matter of wonder or curiosity.
  • To confuse; bewilder; amaze; especially, to confuse by intricacy.
  • To be bewildered, perplexed, or puzzled.
  • To wind intricately.
  • noun A variant of mease, 1.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • transitive verb To perplex greatly; to bewilder; to astonish and confuse; to amaze.
  • intransitive verb obsolete To be bewildered.
  • noun obsolete A wild fancy; a confused notion.
  • noun Confusion of thought; perplexity; uncertainty; state of bewilderment.
  • noun A confusing and baffling network, as of paths or passages; an intricacy; a labyrinth.
  • noun A complex and confusing system or set of rules that causes bwilderment.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A labyrinth; a puzzle consisting of a complicated network of paths or passages, the aim of which is to find one's way.
  • noun Something made up of many confused or conflicting elements; a tangle.
  • noun Confusion of thought; perplexity; uncertainty; state of bewilderment.
  • verb to amaze, astonish, bewilder
  • verb to daze, stupefy, or confuse someone

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun complex system of paths or tunnels in which it is easy to get lost
  • noun something jumbled or confused

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English mase, confusion, maze, from masen, to confuse, daze, from Old English āmasian, to confound; see amaze.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Middle English mase, from an aphetic variant of Middle English masen ("to perplex, bewilder"), or perhaps from Old English *mæs "delusion, bewilderment". Akin to Old English āmasian ("to perplex, confound"), Icelandic masa ("to chatter"). More at amaze.

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