ravelling

English

Alternative forms

• raveling

Etymology

From ravel +‎ -ing.

Noun

ravelling (plural ravellings)

1. gerund of ravel
   1. A tangled mess; a decomposition.
      • 1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter VIII, in Mr. Pratt’s Patients, New York, N.Y., London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC:

        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.

   2. (programming) In the APL programming language: the act of reshaping a variable into a vector.
      • 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.

Verb

ravelling

1. present participle and gerund of ravel

Anagrams

• Granville