Word.ws English Dictionary

ravelling

ravelling noun: a tangled mess; a decomposition. Also the present participle and gerund of ravel.

Noun

ravelling (plural ravellings)

  1. A tangled mess; a decomposition.
    • Afore we got to the shanty Colonel Applegate stuck his head out of the door. His temper had been getting raggeder all the time, and the sousing he got when he fell overboard had just about ripped what was left of it to ravellings.1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter VIII, in Mr. Pratt’s Patients, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC
  2. In the APL programming language: the act of reshaping a variable into a vector.
    • Ravelling is necessary because the execute function in the IBM implementation only accepts charactervectors as argument.1980, Gijsbert van der Linden, APL 80: International Conference on APL, June 24–26, 1980

Also used as

ravelling is also the present participle and gerund of ravel.

Forms of ravelling

pluralravellings
alternative formraveling

Origin of ravelling

From ravel + -ing.

Phrases with ravelling

Questions about ravelling

What does ravelling mean?
Ravelling means a tangled mess; a decomposition.
What part of speech is ravelling?
Ravelling is a noun.
What is the plural of ravelling?
The plural of ravelling is ravellings.

Words near ravelling in the dictionary

  1. ravelled bread
  2. ravelled breads
  3. ravelled out
  4. raveller
  5. ravellers
  6. ravelling
  7. ravelling out
  8. ravellings
  9. ravelly
  10. ravelment
  11. ravelments

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ravelling (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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Cite this entry: “ravelling.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/ravelling. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.