Unravel
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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to unravel
- to separate the threads (of)
- Stop playing with the seam of the table cloth! You will unravel it.
- Mother couldn't unravel the ball of wool anymore after the cat had played with it.
Notice the French dénouer, from whence comes the literary term dénouement.
Etymology
The verb is borrowed from Dutch ravelen, rafelen (“to tangle, become entangled; to fray; to unweave”) [and other forms]; further etymology uncertain. It has been suggested that the verb is originally derived from the noun, but the Oxford English Dictionary regards this as “very uncertain”,[1] and instead regards the noun as having derived from the verb (compare Dutch rafel, raffel (“frayed thread”)).[2]
Ravel is a contranym having both the senses of tangling (verb senses 1.1, 1.2, 1.4.1, and 2.3; noun sense 1) and untangling (verb senses 1.3, 1.4.2, 1.4.3, 2.1, and 2.2; noun sense 2). It would appear that the tangling senses predate the untangling ones (as in Dutch), but this is uncertain because the first published uses of both senses of the words occur around the same time.[1]
Synonyms
