Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use tangle in a sentence

40 example sentences · verb, noun

Tangle means to mix together or intertwine. Example: “Her hair was tangled from a day in the wind.”

Examples of tangle by meaning

verbTo become mixed together or intertwined.

  • Her hair was tangled from a day in the wind.
  • By the afternoon it seemed as if the storm had passed and that frost was setting in; but in the evening the wind rose to gale force, bringing telegraph poles down like skittles and tangling power and telephone lines.1960 March, “The January blizzard in the North-East of Scotland”, in Trains Illustrated, page 137

verbTo enter into an argument, conflict, dispute, or fight.

  • Don't tangle with someone three times your size.
  • He tangled with the law.
  • Compared to the last time they'd tangled with the U.S.2021 February 3, Drachinifel, 19:47 from the start, in Guadalcanal Campaign - Santa Cruz (IJN 2 : 2 USN), archived from the original on 04...

verbTo catch and hold.

  • He spent the night at a friend's place unable to sleep and wondering how he got himself tangled in this mess.2004, Eve Ikuenobe-Otaigbe, Tangled, →ISBN, page 80
  • Why else would she have tangled him in spells of illusion to get him to keep her company?2014, Mercedes Lackey, James Mallory, The House of the Four Winds, →ISBN

nounA complicated or confused state or condition.

  • I tried to sort through this tangle and got nowhere.
  • Perhaps it is fitting that economists’ most-used metric, gross domestic product (GDP), is a tangle too.2013 August 3, “Boundary problems”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8847

nounAny large type of seaweed, especially a species of Laminaria.

  • You've never smelled the tangle o' the Isles.1917, “The Road to the Isles”, in Kenneth Macleod, editor, Songs of the Hebrides

More sentences with tangle

  • I combed out the tangles in my hair. I combed them all out with that fancy comb that Ashley gave me.From the entry comb out
  • You have to comb out the dog's coat regularly. You need to comb all the tangles out of it.From the entry comb out
  • We know that mycorrhizal fungi form and re-form their connections with plants, tangling, detangling and retangling.2020, Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life, page 190. From the entry detangle
  • The long table was a tangle of teletapes and phones and transceivers.2015, Brian Garfield, Line of Succession. From the entry teletape
  • Perhaps it is fitting that economists' most-used metric, gross domestic product (GDP), is a tangle too.2013 August 3, “Boundary problems: America has changed the way it measures GDP”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8847, London: The…. From the entry economics
  • For the cybersleuth, hunting evidence in the data tangle of the Internet, the problem is different.2009 May 12, John Markoff, “Tracking Cyberspies Through the Web Wilderness”, in New York Times. From the entry cybersleuth
  • I try to unsort this big tangle of things that all of a sudden I've tripped over.2008, Susan McGeown, Call Me Elle, page 48. From the entry unsort
  • Beyond was a tangle of undergrowth fringing a pocket of rainforest.2004, Wendy Jane Evans, The Diggings Are Silent, Interactive Press, →ISBN, page 77. From the entry wuffle
  • One has to go down "on all fours" to get below the dense tangle of vegetation.2001, Richard Dwight Porcher, Douglas Alan Rayner, A Guide to the Wildflowers of South Carolina, University of South Carolina, page 95. From the entry pocosin
  • Jenna’s always so smart, Becka wrote, her pen tangling itself on the unprintworthy “smarter than me.”2000, Abby Frucht, “Doc”, in Polly’s Ghost: A Novel, Scribner, →ISBN, part three, page 210. From the entry unprintworthy
  • He should have knowed better than to tangle with you, Miss Lindsay.1993, Stella Cameron, Only by Your Touch, HarperCollins, page 88. From the entry amuser
  • Presently the white, broken stumps, the split sticks and the tangle of the thicket refocused.1954, William Golding, Lord of the Flies. From the entry refocus
  • All along the way was the tangle of branches I'd cut this season—just as overtakeless as the wickets of the living.2023, Tiffany Eberle Kriner, In Thought, Word, and Seed: Reckonings from a Midwest Farm, Grand Rapids, M.I.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing…. From the entry overtakeless
  • Rather than a neat grid of inorganic parallels, analogies and nonanalogies are a tangle, reminiscent of a rhizome.2021, Michael Marder, Green Mass: The Ecological Theology of St. Hildegard of Bingen. From the entry nonanalogy
  • The merest waywardness in a robotic picker can tangle up the whole shed’s operations and delay thousands of deliveries.2019 November 21, Samanth Subramanian, “How our home delivery habit reshaped the world”, in The Guardian. From the entry waywardness
  • Green Dragon has a heavier stem than other lepidiums, which won’t tangle with each other, ultimately decreasing breakage.2019 February 19, “Green Fillers for Flower Arrangements”, in Danzinger Online, Danzinger. From the entry lepidium
  • Five actors are dressed in workout sweats, the better to tangle with the nonrepresentational, noncorresponding text and images.2015 June 25, “Theater Listings for June 26-July 2”, in New York Times. From the entry noncorresponding
  • Tangling with Ziv, Cameron caught him with a flailing elbow, causing the Israeli defender to go down a little easily.2011 October 20, Michael da Silva, “Stoke 3-0 Macc Tel-Aviv”, in BBC Sport. From the entry much
  • Is't more knotful or bewildered than the skein o'life itself, that a good tale tangles the better to unsnarl?2001, Lahsen Benaziza, Romancing Scheherazade: John Barth and the One thousand and one nights. From the entry knotful
  • Second banana Dan Quayle’s tongue tangles were so numerous that they spawned an actual periodical that anthologized his Quaylisms.2000, Richard Lederer, “[A Pleasury of Bloopers] Politicians Incorrect”, in The Bride of Anguished English: A Bonus of Bloopers, Blunders…. From the entry Quaylism
  • A top-knot pigeon (Crested Pigeon), safe in its tangle of mimosa, breathes its little call of warning: `F'uff!'1934, Henry G. Lamond, An Aviary On The Plains, page 52. From the entry topknot pigeon
  • "And the cramps when my body - like a badly articulated skeleton - would all get twisted into one rigid tangle!1925 July – 1926 May, A[rthur] Conan Doyle, “(please specify the chapter number)”, in The Land of Mist (eBook no. 0601351h.html)…. From the entry urticaria
  • Her massive heptapod foremast was a tangle of twisted steel.1925, Hector C[harles] Bywater, The Great Pacific War, Boston, M.A.; New York, N.Y.: Houghton Mifflin Company, page 292. From the entry heptapod
  • He walked up the heath’s western edge, beside a fringe of scrub where hogweed grew in tangles and brambles rose taller than him.2020 March 5, Tom Lamont, “The invisible city: how a homeless man built a life underground”, in The Guardian. From the entry fringe
  • I tumbled onto the sawdust in a tangle of arms and legs with my left fist gripped around my beerpot struggling to keep it vertical.2014, Alan Burt Akers, Challenge of Antares, page 99. From the entry beerpot
  • Also, when fish gilled there wasn't as much extra twine to tangle in, so they were easier to release from the net.2010, Edward A. Perrine, Midnight Tracy, →ISBN, page 147. From the entry gill
  • With a mezair and a cut to the left and a pair of caprioles, Zelikman danced the horse through the tangle of men.2007, Michael Chabon, Gentlemen of the Road, Sceptre, published 2008, page 28. From the entry mézair
  • The mullets frightened by the scare line, leap wildly into the air and get caught either in the net or in the tangle of twigs.2003, NIIR Board of Consultants & Engineers, Handbook on Fisheries and Aquaculture Technology, →ISBN, page 127. From the entry scare line
  • The other way you could always tell was that he loved pisketti noodles, but they'd always attack him and tangle him up in themselves.2002, Jane Landis, “For Bitsy - finally, a gourmet meal!”, in alt.pets.hamsters (Usenet). From the entry pisketti
  • Anyone who has watched, for example, a litter of otter cubs rolling about in an ottery tangle can hardly doubt that they're really having fun.1991, BBC Wildlife, page 236. From the entry ottery

Meaning of tangle

  1. verb To mix together or intertwine.
  2. verb To become mixed together or intertwined.
  3. verb To enter into an argument, conflict, dispute, or fight.

Full definition of tangle

Questions about tangle in a sentence

How do you use tangle in a sentence?
Tangle is used as a verb and noun. For example: “Her hair was tangled from a day in the wind.”
What is a short sentence with tangle?
“He tangled with the law.”
What does tangle mean?
Tangle means to mix together or intertwine.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tangle (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this page: “How to use tangle in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/tangle. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.