Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
- transitive v. To extricate from entanglement or involvement; free. See Synonyms at extricate.
- transitive v. To clear up or resolve (a plot, for example); unravel.
- intransitive v. To become free of entanglement.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- v. To free something from entanglement; to extricate or unknot
- v. To unravel a mystery etc
- v. To become free or untangled
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English
- transitive v. To free from entanglement; to release from a condition of being intricately and confusedly involved or interlaced; to reduce to orderly arrangement; to straighten out.
- transitive v. To extricate from complication and perplexity; disengage from embarrassing connection or intermixture; to disembroil; to set free; to separate.
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- To free from entanglement; extricate from a state of involvement, disorder, or confusion: as, to disentangle a skein of thread, a mass of cordage, a set of accounts, or the affairs of a bankrupt firm.
- To loose from that in or by which anything is entangled; extricate from whatever involves, perplexes, embarrasses, or confuses; disengage: as, to disentangle an object from a mass of twisted cord; to disentangle one's self from business, from political affairs, or from the cares and temptations of life.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- v. smoothen and neaten with or as with a comb
- v. free from involvement or entanglement
- v. extricate from entanglement
- v. release from entanglement of difficulty
- v. separate the tangles of
Etymologies
Examples
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Kennedy-Carter is arguably a better example, but even that is very hard to disentangle from the Iran hostage situation.
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In fact, the mechanism by which Martin introduces the De Lillo comparison — the Guardian review quote — is a real misjudgement in this respect, I’d say, planting the idea firmly in the reader’s head of strange style being “hard to disentangle from the copy-editing errors”.
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The share sale, however, "will go a long way toward helping AIG disentangle" from government ownership, he adds.
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We experience the good and the bad tangled together, and because we are participants in this entanglement, not cool observers, it's all but impossible to disentangle good from bad.
Deepak Chopra: Beyond Belief: Sam Harris Imagines a "Moral Landscape"
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If you fear he will hurt himself -- or you -- then enlist the help of a psychotherapist to disentangle yourself as safely as possible.
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The notion that the heavy hands of government might disentangle the delicate stands of this Gordian knot seems very far-fetched.
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As scholar Valerie Bunce noted in the context of postcommunist Eastern Europe, liberalization helps to "disentangle political power from economic resources and thereby constrain the state, empower society and create competitive political and economic hierarchies."
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Now is a good time for journalists to reassess their coverage of climate change, weed out any bias from their reporting strategies, do what they can to disentangle politics from science, and be more aggressive about covering what many scientists, business figures, policymakers, and activists think is the most important climate story of this still-new millennium.
UK Met office pushes reset button on CRU data. - Moe_Lane’s blog - RedState
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So when it comes to assessing the reasons for the teams' turnaround in fortunes, it's hard to disentangle the importance of conditions from England's inability to grasp the rhythms of the 50-over game.
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So a search on "monitor data usage" gives you a mix of apps whose quality is difficult to disentangle; this is the same problem that Apple has with the App Store only on an even bigger scale.
Google shows off Honeycomb, 'built entirely for tablet': can it beat iPad 2?
bilby commented on the word disentangle
"I do not wish to be insulting, but I firmly believe that if you took an average tow-line, and stretched it out straight across the middle of a field, and then turned your back on it for thirty seconds, that, when you looked round again, you would find that it had got itself altogether in a heap in the middle of the field, and had twisted itself up, and tied itself into knots, and lost its two ends, and become all loops; and it would take you a good half-hour, sitting down there on the grass and swearing all the while, to disentangle it again."
- Jerome K. Jerome, 'Three Men in a Boat'.
August 28, 2009