ravel

English

Etymology

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

Pronunciation

• Rhymes: -ævəl

Noun

ravel (plural ravels)

1. a snarl, complication

   • 1927, DH Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico^[1], edition HTML, Project Gutenberg Australia, published 2009:

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

Verb

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

1. To tangle; entangle; entwine confusedly, become snarled; thus to involve; perplex; confuse.
   • Waller

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

   • Jeremy Taylor

     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, Volumes 5-7^[2], edition Digitized, 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”, USA Today, accessed on 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. To undo the intricacies of; to disentangle or clarify.
3. To pull apart (especially cloth or a seam); unravel.
4. (computing, programming) In the APL 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.

References

• Century Dictionary, Vol. VI, Page 4976, ravel
• Century Dictionary Supplement, Vol. XII, Page 1114, ravel
• Online Etymology, ravel

Translations

To pull apart (especially cloth or a seam)

• Russian: распутывать (ru) (raspútyvat'), распускать (ru) (raspuskát')

To clarify by separation into simpler pieces

Anagrams

• arvel
• laver
• velar