a red herring
B2CEFR level
30/100Rarity: fairly common
NeutralRegister
A piece of information or a topic that is misleading and distracts attention from the real issue.
The witness's alibi turned out to be a red herring that wasted weeks of the investigation.
Rarity runs from 0 (a word everyone knows) to 100 (almost never seen outside specialist or literary writing). Level is the word's real difficulty on the CEFR scale, from A1 to C2.
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