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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
entangle
verb
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ VERB
become
▪ They have, through happenstance, and the nature of urban life that crunches lives and experiences together, simply become entangled.
▪ That is that this is a case where the legal process and the political process have become entangled...
▪ J., we become so entangled in the tale that its considerable length is hardly noticeable.
▪ From the 1950s onward, these goals became increasingly entangled.
▪ On a long pass route, the legs of Michael Irvin and Rod Woodson became entangled.
▪ They become entangled in national budgetary squabbles or bogged down with environmental concerns.
get
▪ Unfortunately small animals such as hedgehogs can get entangled in the net, and removing it to pick the fruit can be tricky.
▪ But the more involved they get, the more entangled they become.
▪ One arm kept getting entangled in the sheets, until he began to think that she was playing a trick on him.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ At best, they can entangle the nets of a fishing boat and kill the crew.
▪ In other words, the more deeply entangled he becomes, the freer he is.
▪ That is that this is a case where the legal process and the political process have become entangled...
▪ The influence of wages is more difficult to assess because cause and effect are entangled with one another.
▪ They have, through happenstance, and the nature of urban life that crunches lives and experiences together, simply become entangled.
▪ We have been entangled in the numbers game too long.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Entangle

Entangle \En*tan"gle\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Entangled; p. pr. & vb. n. Entangling.]

  1. To twist or interweave in such a manner as not to be easily separated; to make tangled, confused, and intricate; as, to entangle yarn or the hair.

  2. To involve in such complications as to render extrication a bewildering difficulty; hence, metaphorically, to insnare; to perplex; to bewilder; to puzzle; as, to entangle the feet in a net, or in briers. ``Entangling alliances.''
    --Washington.

    The difficulties that perplex men's thoughts and entangle their understandings.
    --Locke.

    Allowing her to entangle herself with a person whose future was so uncertain.
    --Froude.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
entangle

early 15c., from en- (1) + tangle (n.). Related: Entangled; entangling.

Wiktionary
entangle

vb. 1 To tangle; to twist or interweave in such a manner as not to be easily separated; to make confused and intricate; as, to entangle yarn or the hair. 2 To involve in such complications as to render extrication difficult; hence, metaphorically, to ensnare; to perplex; to bewilder; to puzzle; as, to entangle the feet in a net, or in briers. 3 To involve in difficulty or embarrassments; to embarrass, puzzle, or distract by adverse or perplexing circumstances, interests, demands, etc.; to hamper; to bewilder.

WordNet
entangle
  1. v. entrap; "Our people should not be mired in the past" [syn: mire]

  2. twist together or entwine into a confusing mass; "The child entangled the cord" [syn: tangle, mat, snarl] [ant: disentangle, disentangle]

Usage examples of "entangle".

Embarrassed, entangled, involved, he flew to Lady Afy, half in pique and half in misery.

Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard.

It was all I could do to tear my eyes off Asteria, who sat panting on the ground, ripping at the shreds of the long robe entangling her neck and legs.

Foul, ceaseless shadows:--thought could not divide The actual world from these entangling evils, Which so bemocked themselves, that I descried All shapes like mine own self, hideously multiplied.

The hurrying passengers smiled at this spectacle at once so ridiculous and so pathetic, but good-naturedly made way for the old men, while Bim, sharing the general excitement, barked and danced about, until his chain was entangled with the legs of at least half a dozen persons at once.

Blues endeavour to penetrate the Bocage, when, I have no doubt, you will know how to deal with them, when they are entangled in your lanes and woods.

They were rather like a cross between cladograms and Feynman space-time diagrams, and were used to keep cause-and-effect events from becoming entangled.

I entangled myself, and could not get out again without working great deray amongst the coarse linen threads that stood in warp from one end of the apartment unto the other.

And Stacy had told me enough for me to see that the Dosses and the Manitows had been entangled beyond mere neighborliness.

On this account they should not be eaten when at all old and hard by persons of slow digestion, because apt to lodge in the intestines, and to become entangled in their caecal pouch, or in its appendix.

Trenco, then can burrow in its mud, from which they derive part of their sustenance, they can emerge therefrom into the sunlight, they can, undamaged float in or roll along before the ever-present Trenconian wind, and they can enwrap, entangle, or otherwise seize and hold anything with which they come in contact which by any chance may prove edible.

His weak stomach refused the exactitude of his refined perceptions, lest chance death or injury drag him into the entangling fabric of tragedy.

The Welshman is most deeply entangled in the north, and from what I hear both heart and guile are failing him.

This did not prevent her being a confused, entangled, inconsequent, discursive old woman, whose charity began at home and ended nowhere, whose credulity kept pace with it, and who knew less about her fellow-creatures, if possible, after fifty years of humanitary zeal, than on the day she had gone into the field to testify against the iniquity of most arrangements.

Dixon of Bothell, an apprentice ironworker, apparently became entangled in a welding lead and fell from the 43rd story of the new building, which is scheduled for completion late next year.