ravel - What does it mean?

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.