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# unravel

«unravel» in Mova's school dictionary: **To undo knitting or cloth by pulling the threads apart** — its meaning for a pupil, its sense in the lessons and examples.

### part of speech

verb (unravels, unravelled, unravelling)

### meaning for a pupil

1) To undo knitting or cloth by pulling the threads apart. [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/U/unravel/#m1)

2) To work out the answer to something tangled or hard to understand. [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/U/unravel/#m2)

### sense in the lessons

In stories, a spinner or weaver undoes thread or cloth; in lessons, to unravel a problem is to find out how its parts fit together.

### examples

- She unravelled the old scarf to make a new one. [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/U/unravel/#x1)
- The spider's web unravelled in the wind. [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/U/unravel/#x2)
- Can you unravel this puzzle? [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/U/unravel/#x3)

### note

Nothing for maths; unravelling a problem means working out the parts, and it does not change any count.

### Trees and pragmatics

[Every meaning and example of «unravel» parsed by Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/school/U/unravel/), each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.