Raveled

Part of speech: adjective, verb

Definitions

1. To become confused or tangled, to disentangle or resolve a complex situation, and to make a scenario more difficult than required are key interpretations of this state
2. This state can refer to being intricately mixed up, to the act of untying or clarifying complexity, and to increasing the confusion or intricacy in a matter
3. To become twisted into an intricate or confused mass of threads or fibers ; to carefully separate or loosen tangled threads or fibers ; to make a situation more complex and difficult to understand

Etymology: "Raveled" is simply the past tense and past participle of "ravel," so the history belongs to the verb. The verb came into English by borrowing from Dutch "ravelen" and "rafelen," which meant to tangle, to fray, or to unweave. The Dutch forms are tied to a noun, "rafel," meaning a frayed thread, and while it is sometimes assumed the verb came first, the Oxford English Dictionary treats that idea as very uncertain and suggests the noun grew out of the verb instead. The most striking feature of "ravel" is that it is a contranym, a word whose two senses point in opposite directions. It can mean to become hopelessly tangled, as in a knotted skein of yarn, or to disentangle and clarify, as in unravelling a mystery. Dutch seems to have developed the tangling sense first, with the untangling sense following, though the earliest published English uses of both senses appear at about the same time, which leaves the sequence unclear.

Synonyms: tangled, entangled, unraveled

Antonyms: straightened, organized