ravelling

plural ravellings · alternative raveling

1. gerund of ravel
   1. A tangled mess; a decomposition.

      Afore we got to the shanty Colonel Applegate stuck his head out of the door. His temper had been getting raggeder all the time, and the sousing he got when he fell overboard had just about ripped what was left of it to ravellings.

      1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter VIII, in Mr. Pratt’s Patients, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC

   2. computingIn the APL programming language: the act of reshaping a variable into a vector.

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

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

alternative raveling

1. gerundparticiplepresentpresent participle and gerund of ravel