Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • intransitive verb To snarl; growl.
  • noun A protruding knot on a tree.
  • transitive verb To make knotted; twist.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A knot; a knotty growth in wood; a rough irregular protuberance on a tree.
  • To give a rough ridging or milling to, as to the edge of a thumbscrew.
  • Same as gnar.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun a knot in wood; a large or hard knot, or a protuberance with twisted grain, on a tree.
  • intransitive verb To growl; to snarl.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • verb intransitive To snarl or growl; to gnar.
  • noun A knot in wood; a large or hard knot, or a protuberance with twisted grain, on a tree.
  • noun Something resembling a knot in wood, such as in stone or limbs.
  • noun mathematics The average value of the magnitude squared of the curl of a vector field over a continuous path that is tangent to the vector field at every point. In mathematical notation, gnarl is represented by the lowercase Greek letter ξ.
  • verb transitive To knot or twist something.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • verb make complaining remarks or noises under one's breath
  • noun something twisted and tight and swollen
  • verb twist into a state of deformity

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[ Frequentative of gnar.]

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Back-formation from gnarled.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Onomatopoeia

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Back-formation from gnarled.

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Examples

Comments

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  • To make complaining remarks or noises under one's breath.

    (also twist/knot)

    February 23, 2007