Ravel
Pronunciation
- Rhymes: -ævəl
Origin
From Dutch ravelen ("to tangle, fray out, unweave"), from Dutch rafel ("frayed thread")
Full definition of ravel
Noun
ravel
(plural ravels)- a snarl, complication
- 1927 , DH Lawrence , Mornings in Mexico Chapter , The savannah valley is shadeless, spotted only with the thorny ravel of mesquite bushes.
Verb
- To tangle; entangle; entwine confusedly, become snarled; thus to involve; perplex; confuse.
- WallerWhat glory's due to him that could divide
Such ravelled interests? - Jeremy TaylorThe faith of very many men seems a duty so weak and indifferent, is so often untwisted by violence, or ravelled and entangled in weak discourses!
- 1871 , , Popular Science News, Volumes 5-7 Chapter , … and in them are minute glands, which resemble ravelled tubes …
- , 2011-09-10, Martha T. Moore, After 9/11, dinner gang raises funds to honor those lost, But the real work of the First Thursday Foundation is remembering, and its biggest gift is knitting back together lives raveled by loss.
- To undo the intricacies of; to disentangle or clarify.
- To pull apart (especially cloth or a seam); unravel.
- (computing, programming) In the APL language, to reshape (a variable) into a vector.
- 1975, Tse-yun Feng, Parallel processing: proceedings of the Sagamore Computer ConferenceLOAD.S loads a sequence of scalars from the ravelled form of a matrix into successive AM elements.
- 1980, Gijsbert van der Linden, APL 80: International Conference on APL, June 24-26, 1980Ravelling is necessary because the execute function in the IBM implementation only accepts charactervectors as argument.
Usage notes
The spellings ravelling and ravelled are more common in the UK than in the US.