disentangle

present singular third person disentangles · participle present disentangling · participle past disentangled · past disentangled

1. transitiveTo free something from entanglement; to extricate or unknot.

   I had to disentangle him from his own shoelaces.

   1 more example

   In my own opinion, “criminal religious movements” (CRMs) is a more accurate and useful category than “cults.” It uses, although selectively, elements from the criminological tradition. It avoids the word “cult” and tries to disentangle the category from both the folk psychology of brainwashing and the politics of “extremism” in theology.

   2023 March 29, Beatriz Caiuby Labate, Clancy Cavnar, Religious Freedom and the Global Regulation of Ayahuasca, Taylor & Francis, →ISBN

   Synonyms: unsnarl, untangle, feeze, tease out, unravel, unsnarl, untangle

2. transitiveTo unravel; to separate into discrete components or units.

   This overlapping is reflective of hybrid languages, where certain features (phonetic, orthographic, semantic, syntactic) are also difficult to disentangle.

   2018, James Lambert, “A multitude of ‘lishes’: The nomenclature of hybridity”, in English World-Wide, page 10

   1 more example

   It is often hard to distinguish word frequency effects from age-of-acquisition effects: People are especially fast at processing the words they learned earliest, and these words tend to be the most frequent. We can disentangle the two with words that are learned early but are relatively infrequent (such as fairytale words like dragon).

   2025, Edward A. F. Gibson, “Preliminaries: Components of Language Structure” (chapter 2), in Syntax: A Cognitive Approach, MIT Press, →DOI, →ISBN, page 29

   Synonyms: unweave

3. intransitiveTo become free or untangled.