Definition of "thicket" []

• A dense growth of shrubs or underbrush; a copse. (noun)
• Something suggestive of a dense growth of plants, as in impenetrability or thickness: "the thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life” ( Daniel J. Boorstin). (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.

• "This historical thicket is rendered all but impenetrable by the facts that, as Browning lucidly and vividly demonstrates, German anti-Semitism was hardly a fixed concept but, rather, evolved and mutated with the ever shifting circumstances; that the Nazi regime and its chains of command and decision were highly decentralized — which meant that at any given moment the interpretations and conceptions of, say, Goebbels and Rosenberg concerning the timing and realization of the Final Solution could vary significantly from those of Himmler and Heydrich; and, most important, that the documentary evidence is both vast and frustratingly incomplete."
• "I do recall a thicket of reporters, which is what I understand the Beitbarts of the world were claiming should have picked up the wrongful language if it occurred."
• "The bushes near Carleton Beck exuded the deep sonorous zoom sound of queen red-tailed and buff-tailed bumblebees, and all around the lee side of the thicket were the hoverflies known technically as Eristalis intricarius."