intertwine
Americanverb (used with or without object)
-
intertwines,
present (3rd person singular)
-
intertwined,
past participle, past
-
intertwining
present participle
verb
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
-
intertwinesimple
-
intertwinessimple
-
have intertwinedperfect
-
has intertwinedperfect
-
am intertwiningprogressive
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are intertwiningprogressive
-
is intertwiningprogressive
-
have been intertwiningperfect progressive
-
has been intertwiningperfect progressive
Past
-
intertwinedsimple
-
had intertwinedperfect
-
was intertwiningprogressive
-
were intertwiningprogressive
-
had been intertwiningperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of intertwine
Explanation
Things that intertwine are twisted or mixed together. You have to intertwine yarn to make a scarf. When things intertwine, they're all mixed up together — it's hard to separate them. To make any type of clothing, threads have to be intertwined. Rope is made of smaller fibers that intertwine. Related jobs—like a writer and an editor—intertwine too, because they are so closely related. You can say people are intertwined if they're close to each other, as family or friends. Getting intertwined could be a metaphor for getting married; the threads of your lives are getting tangled together.
Vocabulary lists containing intertwine
The Distance Between Us
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The Sea of Monsters
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King and the Dragonflies
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Do these frequently compared pursuits have enough in common to intertwine them into a coherent story?
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 29, 2026
Canada and the EU are looking to intertwine research institutions to create a network of scientific output to compete with the U.S. university system.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 13, 2026
But navigating the ins and outs of stories that intertwine without overstepping has required nimbleness.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 19, 2026
As she offers her prayers, the sacred space becomes a moment of spiritual release, where devotion and vulnerability intertwine.
From BBC ● Nov. 30, 2024
For Wagner, nothing was allowed to distract from the unfolding musical story and he would happily intertwine chorus, solo, duets, instrumental interludes so that you could hardly tell when one ended and another began.
From "The Story of Music" by Howard Goodall
Chapter by chapter, the author intertwines the sagas of both sets of grandparents.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 7, 2026
The deal further intertwines Musk's sprawling business empire, which already includes carmaker Tesla and social media platform X, formerly Twitter.
From Barron's ● Feb. 2, 2026
On songs like “Slushy” and “Predictable Girl,” she intertwines a menagerie of robotic, spacey sirens with tinges of Jersey club beats and ’90s-influenced R&B chords.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 14, 2025
"But now there's a very direct lineage between local teams, larger structures like the NFL Academy, leagues and how it all intertwines."
From BBC ● Dec. 28, 2024
It intertwines with any other great social evil which may be present.
From Folkways A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals by William Graham Sumner
“Jensen Huang has become enormously influential in shaping U.S. chip policy, and Nvidia’s commercial interests are intertwined with Washington’s China strategy in complex and sometimes conflicting ways,” Lee said.
From MarketWatch ● Oct. 31, 2026
The discovery suggests that persistent back pain may become deeply intertwined with a person's sense of self, potentially helping explain why conventional pain treatments often provide limited relief.
From Science Daily ● Oct. 30, 2026
For these elections are not just proximate, they are intertwined.
From BBC ● Oct. 26, 2026
They’re hilarious, but there are lives intertwined with the art.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 19, 2026
Over the years, over the course of her life, she would try repeatedly to untangle these threads, and find each time that they were hopelessly intertwined.
From "Little Fires Everywhere" by Celeste Ng
Elon Musk has spent two decades running Tesla and SpaceX, intertwining their resources and ambitions.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 22, 2026
She’s from Japan, he’s from Mexico, their native languages intertwining at home, although you could argue their shared tongue is actually ballroom.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 25, 2026
"What it does portend, to me, is that Hong Kong will accelerate its economic intertwining with Beijing."
From Barron's ● Sep. 16, 2026
The deal would signal a deeper "intertwining" of the government and private businesses in the US, following a trend seen elsewhere in places like China, Mr Nicholson told the BBC.
From BBC ● Aug. 15, 2025
And again, on many places there was black cloth draped with intertwining ribbons of blue and gold.
From "Crispin: The Cross of Lead" by Avi
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Get a wordDefinitions 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.
