While this word generally means any bored or drilled hole, in the New Testament it specifically refers to the eye of a needle in Jesus' famous pronouncement about wealth. The image is deliberately hyperbolic—a camel passing through a needle's eye—to emphasize the impossibility of the rich entering God's kingdom by their own power. Some have tried to soften this by inventing a small Jerusalem gate called 'the needle's eye,' but no such gate existed; Jesus meant the literal impossibility.