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detangle

verbC1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speech — tangle sits at #8,193Too rare in one of the two pools to compare — fewer than 20 uses in speech or in writing

To detangle is to work knots out of hair. Detangle with a wide comb, detangle before washing.

Patience beats force entirely, since pulling a knot tightens it. A spray made to detangle works by coating the strands so they slide past each other.

Definitions of detangle

  1. 1verbdetangleTo work knots out of hair.C1

    “It took twenty minutes to detangle after a day in the wind.”

detangle is a grooming.

Where it comes from

  1. Middle English

    tanglen

  2. English

    tangle

  3. English, today

    detangle

Built from

  • þang · Old Norse — tangle; seaweed

From de- + tangle. tangle comes from Middle English tanglen, probably of gmq origin, compare Swedish taggla (“to disorder”), Old Norse þǫngull, þang (“tangle; seaweed”), see Etymology 2 below.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Hair & Grooming

Practise this word

detangle in the wild

  • A brush is normally used for detangling hair, for example after sleep or showering.

    Hairbrush

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

  • tangle
  • entangle
  • untangle
  • disentangle