Word.ws English Dictionary

ravelled

ravelled adjective: entwined together; tangled. Also the simple past and past participle of ravel.

Adjective (1)

ravelled (comparative more ravelled, superlative most ravelled)

  1. Entwined together; tangled.
    • [I]n them are minute glands, which resemble ravelled tubes […]1871, Popular Science News, page 61
  2. Unravelled; frayed.
  3. (figuratively) Complicated; confused; involved.
    • What glory's due to him that could divide / Such ravelled interests?1660, Edmund Waller, To the King, upon his Majesty's Happy Return
  4. Of a variable in the APL programming language: which has been reshaped into a vector.
    • LOAD.S loads a sequence of scalars from the ravelled form of a matrix into successive AM elements.1975, Tse-yun Feng, Parallel processing: proceedings of the Sagamore Computer Conference

Adjective (2)

ravelled (not comparable)

  1. Of bread: made from flour and bran.

Also used as

ravelled is also the simple past and past participle of ravel.

Forms of ravelled

comparativemore ravelled
superlativemost ravelled

Origin of ravelled

From ravel + -ed.

Origin unknown.

Words formed from ravelled

Phrases with ravelled

Questions about ravelled

What does ravelled mean?
Ravelled means entwined together; tangled.
What part of speech is ravelled?
Ravelled is an adjective.

Words near ravelled in the dictionary

  1. raveling
  2. raveling out
  3. ravelings
  4. ravelins
  5. ravell'd
  6. ravelled
  7. ravelled bread
  8. ravelled breads
  9. ravelled out
  10. raveller
  11. ravellers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ravelled (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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