chase one's tail
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.91 in modern English
18
Scrabble Score
13
Letters
2
Syllables
10
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
To busily try to perform many tasks or to repeatedly revise one's plans, especially with inefficient use of one's time and limited results.
verb
Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see chase, one's, tail.
Example Sentences
- "People wanting to get married . . . would have to trail around separately to arrange flowers, cars, a photographer, the cake and a reception venue. . . . "At the moment, they have to chase their tail making sure all these things are done.""
- ""You're forever chasing your tail when you're dealing with such large areas. . . . It was difficult to see how we would ever get on top of the problem.""
- "The phone rings pretty much immediately and I have a conversation, usually apologising for something or explaining why I haven't managed to do something. I'm always chasing my tail."
- "“If you end up changing your strategy based on hot or cold tendencies, more often than not, you’re chasing your tail and you’re actually destroying value rather than sticking to what you know is right based off the data over a longer period of time,” Luhnow said."
- "Baby, I know places we won't be found, and They'll be chasing their tails trying to track us down"
- "What is unbearable, in fact, is the feeling, 13 years after 9/11, that America has been chasing its tail; that, in some whack-a-mole horror show, the quashing of a jihadi enclave here only spurs the sprouting of another there; that the ideology of Al Qaeda is still reverberating through a blocked Arab world whose Sunni-Shia balance (insofar as that went) was upended by the American invasion of Iraq."