ravel

See also: Ravel

English

Etymology

From Dutch ravelen (“to tangle, fray out, unweave”), from Dutch rafel (“frayed thread”).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈɹævəl/
• Rhymes: -ævəl

• Audio (UK)

  (file)

Noun

ravel (plural ravels)

1. A snarl; a complication.
   • 1927, DH Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico‎^[1], HTML edition, Project Gutenberg Australia, published 2009:

     The savannah valley is shadeless, spotted only with the thorny ravel of mesquite bushes.

2. A ravelled thread.

Verb

ravel (third-person singular simple present ravels, present participle ravelling or (US) raveling, simple past and past participle ravelled or (US) raveled)

1. (transitive) To tangle; entangle; entwine confusedly, become snarled; thus to involve; perplex; confuse.
   • 1660, Edmund Waller, To the King, upon his Majesty's Happy Return

     What glory's due to him that could divide / Such ravelled interests?

   • 1653, Jeremy Taylor, Twenty-five Sermons preached at Golden Grove; being for the Winter Half-year

     The 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^[2], volume 5-7, Digitized edition, published 2011, page 61:

     … and in them are minute glands, which resemble ravelled tubes …

   • 2011 September 10, Martha T. Moore, “After 9/11, dinner gang raises funds to honor those lost”, in USA Today‎^[3], retrieved 2012-08-24:

     But the real work of the First Thursday Foundation is remembering, and its biggest gift is knitting back together lives raveled by loss.

2. (transitive, figuratively) To undo the intricacies of; to disentangle or clarify.
3. (transitive) To pull apart (especially cloth or a seam); unravel.
4. (intransitive) To become entangled.
5. (intransitive) To become untwisted or unwoven.
6. (computing, programming) In the APL programming language, to reshape (a variable) into a vector.
   • 1975, Tse-yun Feng, Parallel processing: proceedings of the Sagamore Computer Conference

     LOAD.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, 1980:

     Ravelling 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.

Translations

To pull apart (especially cloth or a seam)

• Greek: εκτυλίσσω (el) (ektylísso)
• Irish: rois

• Russian: распу́тывать (ru) (raspútyvatʹ), распуска́ть (ru) (raspuskátʹ)

To clarify by separation into simpler pieces

• Greek: ξεμπερδεύω (el) (xemperdévo)

References

• Century Dictionary, Vol. VI, Page 4976, ravel
• Century Dictionary Supplement, Vol. XII, Page 1114, ravel
• The New Century Dictionary 1952, Volume Two, page 1476, Ravel
• Online Etymology, ravel
• ravel at OneLook Dictionary Search

Anagrams

• arvel, larve, laver, reval, velar

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Westrobothnian

Noun

ravel n

1. Talk.

Related terms

• raväl