house of cards

1. 1.

   a speculative scheme that depends on unstable factors that the planner cannot control

   “his proposal was nothing but a house of cards”

   “a real estate bubble”

   Synonymsbubble

   Broaderscheme
2. 2.

   an unstable construction with playing cards

   “he built three levels of his cardcastle before it collapsed”

   Synonymscardhousecard-housecardcastle

   Broaderstructure

Questions about house of cards

What does house of cards mean?

house of cards means "a speculative scheme that depends on unstable factors that the planner cannot control". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

What is another word for house of cards?

Close synonyms include bubble, cardhouse, card-house, cardcastle. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is house of cards a common word?

house of cards is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.