to become disjoined thread by thread or fiber by fiber; fray.
to become tangled.
to become confused or perplexed.
(of a road surface) to lose aggregate.
to tangle (threads, fibres, etc) or (of threads, fibres, etc) to become entangled
(often foll by out) to tease or draw out (the fibres of a fabric or garment) or (of a garment or fabric) to fray out in loose ends; unravel
to disentangle or resolve
to ravel out a complicated story
to break up (a road surface) in patches or (of a road surface) to begin to break up; fret; scab
archaic to make or become confused or complicated
First recorded in 1575–85, ravel is from the Dutch word rafelen
Ravel is a contronym, a word that has two meanings that are the opposite of each other. Confusingly, ravel can mean both "tangle" and "untangle." It's perfectly understandable to tangle up the meanings of ravel! If you work to ravel yarn into a neat ball, your cat may come along and try to ravel it again. How can a word mean both one thing and its opposite? In the case of ravel, the answer is sewing: As threads come unwoven from a cloth, they become tangled on each other. Since untangling is never far from tangling, ravel covers both meanings.
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Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Grealish is particularly fond of tools that allow cohosters to get even more creative with their posts, like ravel by artist and game designer Everest Pipkin, which enables the interactive fiction tool Twine in cohost.
From The Verge • Aug. 3, 2022
“Hence, ravel; a tool that does the fiddly nesting together of details and summary tags for you.”
From The Verge • Aug. 3, 2022
Danny Lavery: Let’s ravel up some sleaves of care today!
From Slate • Apr. 26, 2021
Despite Hellman's efforts, her reputation began to ravel in her lifetime, after she sued Mary McCarthy for calling her a liar on TV.
From Time Magazine Archive
There was a yarn snowman that Courtney had made when a Brownie, it was gray now, and beginning to ravel.
From "The Great Gilly Hopkins" by Katherine Paterson
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
