Verb

to separate the threads (of); disentangle

Stop playing with the seam of the tablecloth! You will unravel it.

Mother couldn't unravel the ball of wool after the cat had played with it.

to become undone; to collapse

* 2010 , Ian Cowie, "State pension Ponzi scheme unravels with retirement at 70", The Telegraph , June 24th, 2010,

*:The great Ponzi scheme that lies behind our State pension is unravelling – as they all do eventually – because money being taken from new investors is insufficient to honour promises issued to earlier generations.

New Ponzi Scheme Unravels !

(figurative) To clear from complication or difficulty; to unfold; to solve.

to unravel a plot

to unravel a mystery

to unravel the confusion

(figurative) To separate the connected or united parts of; to throw into disorder; to confuse.

* Dryden

Art shall be conjured for it, and nature all unravelled .

''to unravel the global compromise achieved in the Constitutional Treaty

''to unravel the broad consensus which was created

Verb

To tangle; entangle; entwine confusedly, become snarled; thus to involve; perplex; confuse.

* Waller

What glory's due to him that could divide / Such ravelled interests?

* Jeremy Taylor

The faith of very many men seems a duty so weak and indifferent, is so often untwisted by violence, or ravelled and entangled in weak discourses!

:* {{quote-book

, year=1871 , year_published=2011 , edition=Digitized , editor= , author= , title=Popular Science News, Volumes 5-7 , chapter= citation , genre= , publisher= , isbn= , page=61 , passage=… and in them are minute glands , which resemble ravelled tubes … }}

:* {{quote-web

, date=2011-09-10 , year= , first= , last= , author=Martha T. Moore , authorlink= , title=After 9/11, dinner gang raises funds to honor those lost , site=USA Today citation , archiveorg= , accessdate=2012-08-24 , passage=But the real work of the First Thursday Foundation is remembering, and its biggest gift is knitting back together lives raveled by loss. }}

To undo the intricacies of; to disentangle or clarify.

To pull apart (especially cloth or a seam); unravel.

(computing, programming) In the APL language, to reshape (a variable) into a vector.

* 1975 , Tse-yun Feng, Parallel processing: proceedings of the Sagamore Computer Conference

LOAD.S loads a sequence of scalars from the ravelled form of a matrix into successive AM elements.

* 1980 , Gijsbert van der Linden, APL 80: International Conference on APL, June 24-26, 1980

Ravelling is necessary because the execute function in the IBM implementation only accepts charactervectors as argument.