Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Complicated and difficult to unravel. synonym: complex.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- verb Simple past tense and past participle of
tangle .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective in a confused mass
- adjective highly complex or intricate and occasionally devious
Etymologies
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Examples
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She says finding that part of her past uncovered both shame and pride -- what she calls the tangled history of this country.
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Their imaginative use of the word tangled suggests a nautical genesis, as in Ayers’s “tangled love affairs” and “tangled story” and Obama’s “tangled arguments.”
Deconstructing Obama Jack Cashill 2011
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Their imaginative use of the word tangled suggests a nautical genesis, as in Ayers’s “tangled love affairs” and “tangled story” and Obama’s “tangled arguments.”
Deconstructing Obama Jack Cashill 2011
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All about them the huge-rooted trees blocked their footing, while coiled and knotted climbers, of the girth of a man's arm, were thrown from lofty branch to lofty branch, or hung in tangled masses like so many monstrous snakes.
Chapter 25 2010
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Last week: Bowyer, Jimmie Johnson and Denny Hamlin tangled as they received the checkered flag with Bowyer ending up 12th after spinning to the inside of the track.
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Sprawling playa bottoms are pocked with feedlots, mountains of hay bales, and farm machinery rusting in tangled shelterbelts.
The Texas Panhandle: Home to Some of America's Best Pheasant Hunting 2008
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Maybe he liked his authentic steaks cooked medium-rare and tried not to think of the lost ships and their crews drifting in tangled debris as he injected himself with rest serum at the conclusion of each day.
365 tomorrows » 2008 » May : A New Free Flash Fiction SciFi Story Every Day 2008
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Get you nose out of politics go and preach the word as it is rather than gettingin tangled in these politics.
Evangelical plans lawsuit over new Obama outreach effort 2008
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What some called his tangled locution when testifying before Congress was, by his own admission, intentionally obscuring.
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When the bookworms did not crumble into a fit of giggles (as they usually do when I have caught them ditching dodo*) my brain tangled in confusion.
sonofgroucho commented on the word tangled
"Oh, what tangled webs we weave, When we first practice to deceive." Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832).
November 22, 2007