disentangle

verb

Etymology: Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *dwóh₁ Proto-Indo-European *d(w)is- Proto-Italic *dis- Latin dis- Old French des-bor. ▲ Latin dis-bor. Middle English dis- English dis- Middle English entanglen English entangle English disentangle From dis- + entangle.

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

   “I had to disentangle him from his own shoelaces.”

   “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.”

2. To 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.”

   “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).”

3. To become free or untangled.