Definition of "cat's cradle" [cat's cradle]

• A game in which a string is looped on the fingers to form an intricate pattern between a player's hands that can be successively varied or transferred to another player's hands. (noun)
• An intricate pattern: "Their computers devised a cat's cradle of infinite complexity for the flight tracks of half a dozen space cameras around the globe's surface” ( Frederick Forsyth). (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "A Maiden Perrin had not noticed, sitting on her heels against a wagon a few paces from Gedwyn, answered the same way, and so did another who until that moment had been playing at cat's cradle with a spear-sister near the prisoners."
• "11: 40 P.M. Bartlett was twenty feet down under a cat's cradle of girders that kept the wreckage from crushing him."
• "Coram and Mendan stopped their game of cat's cradle once more; there was no sign that either had listened, but she would not wager her life on it."