disentangle

Verb

disentangle (third-person singular simple present disentangles, present participle disentangling, simple past and past participle disentangled)

1. (transitive) To free something from entanglement; to extricate or unknot.
   • I had to disentangle him from his own shoelaces.
   • In my own opinion, “criminal religious movements” (CRMs) is a more accurate and useful category than “cults.” It uses, although selectively, elements from the criminological tradition. It avoids the word “cult” and tries to disentangle the category from both the folk psychology of brainwashing and...2023 March 29, Beatriz Caiuby Labate, Clancy Cavnar, Religious Freedom and the Global Regulation of Ayahuasca, Taylor & Francis, →ISBN

   Synonyms:

   unsnarl, untangle, feeze, tease out, unravel

2. (transitive) To unravel; to separate into discrete components or units.
   • This overlapping is reflective of hybrid languages, where certain features (phonetic, orthographic, semantic, syntactic) are also difficult to disentangle.2018, James Lambert, “A multitude of ‘lishes’: The nomenclature of hybridity”, in English World-Wide, page 10
   • It is often hard to distinguish word frequency effects from age-of-acquisition effects: People are especially fast at processing the words they learned earliest, and these words tend to be the most frequent. We can disentangle the two with words that are learned early but are relatively infrequent...2025, Edward A. F. Gibson, “Preliminaries: Components of Language Structure” (chapter 2), in Syntax: A Cognitive Approach, MIT Press, →DOI, →ISBN, page 29

   Synonyms:

   unweave

3. (intransitive) To become free or untangled.