knots

Noun

knot (plural knots)

1. A looping of a piece of string or of any other long, flexible material that cannot be untangled without passing one or both ends of the material through its loops.
   • Climbers must make sure that all knots are both secure and of types that will not weaken the rope.
2. A tangled clump of hair or similar.
   • The nurse was brushing knots from the protesting child's hair.
3. A maze-like pattern.
   • Flowers worthy of paradise, which, not nice art / In beds and curious knots, but nature boon / Poured forth profuse on hill, and dale, and plain.1667, John Milton, “Book IV”, in Paradise Lost. […], London: […] [Samuel Simmons], and are to be sold by Peter Parker […]; [a]nd by Robert Boulter […]; [a]nd Matthias Walker, […], →OCLC; republished...
4. A non-self-intersecting closed curve in (e.g., three-dimensional) space that is an abstraction of a knot (in sense 1 above).
   • A knot can be defined as a non-self-intersecting broken line whose endpoints coincide: when such a knot is constrained to lie in a plane, then it is simply a polygon.
5. A difficult situation.
   • I got into a knot when I inadvertently insulted a policeman.
6. The whorl left in lumber by the base of a branch growing out of the tree's trunk.
   • When preparing to tell stories at a campfire, I like to set aside a pile of pine logs with lots of knots, since they burn brighter and make dramatic pops and cracks.

See all 28 meanings of knot