verb ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Verb

1. 1
   To remove tangles or knots from. transitive

   "With gentle combing, untangle your hair."

2. 2
   become or cause to become undone by separating the fibers or threads of wordnet
3. 3
   To remove confusion or mystery from. broadly, figuratively, transitive

   "It took a while, but he finally untangled the problem."

4. 4
   release from entanglement of difficulty wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms

disentangleunraveldisentangleextricateunravelabsolve

Antonyms

All antonyms

entangleraveltangle

Example

More examples

"It took Tom ages to untangle his fishing line."

Etymology

From un- + tangle.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.