ravel
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
See also: Ravel
English[edit]
Etymology[edit]
From Dutch ravelen (“to tangle, fray out, unweave”), from Dutch rafel (“frayed thread”).
Pronunciation[edit]
Noun[edit]
ravel (plural ravels)
- 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.
- A ravelled thread.
Verb[edit]
ravel (third-person singular simple present ravels, present participle ravelling or (US) raveling, simple past and past participle ravelled or (US) raveled)
- (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.
- 1660, Edmund Waller, To the King, upon his Majesty's Happy Return
- (transitive, figuratively) To undo the intricacies of; to disentangle or clarify.
- (transitive) To pull apart (especially cloth or a seam); unravel.
- (intransitive) To become entangled.
- (intransitive) To become untwisted or unwoven.
- (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.
- 1975, Tse-yun Feng, Parallel processing: proceedings of the Sagamore Computer Conference
Usage notes[edit]
- The spellings ravelling and ravelled are more common in the UK than in the US.
Translations[edit]
To pull apart (especially cloth or a seam)
|
To clarify by separation into simpler pieces
|
References[edit]
- 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[edit]
Westrobothnian[edit]
Noun[edit]
ravel n
- Talk.
Related terms[edit]
Categories:
- English terms derived from Dutch
- English 2-syllable words
- English terms with IPA pronunciation
- English terms with audio links
- English lemmas
- English nouns
- English countable nouns
- English terms with quotations
- English verbs
- English transitive verbs
- English intransitive verbs
- en:Computing
- en:Programming
- English contranyms
- Westrobothnian lemmas
- Westrobothnian nouns
- Westrobothnian neuter nouns