in circles

1. 1.

   without making progress

   “the candidates talked in circles”

Questions about in circles

What does in circles mean?

in circles means "without making progress".

Is in circles a common word?

in circles 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.