knot
/nɑt/ noun B2- A looping of a piece of string or of any other long, flexible material that cannot be untangled without passing one or both ends of the material through its loops. · Climbers must make sure that all knots are both secure and of types that will not weaken the rope.
- A tangled clump of hair or similar. · The nurse was brushing knots from the protesting child's hair.
- A maze-like pattern.
- A non-self-intersecting closed curve in (e.g., three-dimensional) space that is an abstraction of a knot (in sense 1 above).
- A difficult situation. · I got into a knot when I inadvertently insulted a policeman.
- The whorl left in lumber by the base of a branch growing out of the tree's trunk.
- Local swelling in a tissue area, especially skin, often due to injury. · Jeremy had a knot on his head where he had bumped it on the bedframe.
- A tightened and contracted part of a muscle that feels like a hard lump under the skin.
Plural knots
Phrasal verbs and expressions
From the library
“A knot!” said Alice, always ready to make herself useful, and looking anxiously about her.
As soon as she had made out the proper way of nursing it, (which was to twist it up into a sort of knot, and then keep tight hold of its right ear and left foot, so as to prevent its undoing itself,) she carried it out into the open air.
They found him stretched out on a warm ledge in the afternoon sun, admiring his beautiful new coat, for he had been in retirement for the last ten days changing his skin, and now he was very splendid--darting his big blunt-nosed head along the ground, and twisting the thirty feet of his body into fantastic knots and curves, and licking his lips as he thought of his dinner to come.
Marilla was a tall, thin woman, with angles and without curves; her dark hair showed some gray streaks and was always twisted up in a hard little knot behind with two wire hairpins stuck aggressively through it.
Other matches
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