knot

Plural: knot, knots

Noun

• a tight cluster of people or things
  • "a small knot of women listened to his sermon"
  • "the bird had a knot of feathers forming a crest"
• any of various fastenings formed by looping and tying a rope (or cord) upon itself or to another rope or to another object
• a hard cross-grained round piece of wood in a board where a branch emerged
  • "the saw buckled when it hit a knot"
• something twisted and tight and swollen
  • "their muscles stood out in knots"
  • "his stomach was in knots"
• a unit of length used in navigation; exactly 1,852 meters; historically based on the distance spanned by one minute of arc in latitude
• soft lump or unevenness in a yarn; either an imperfection or created by design
• a sandpiper that breeds in the Arctic and winters in the southern hemisphere
• 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.
• A tangled clump of hair or similar.
• 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.
• 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.
• A tightened and contracted part of a muscle that feels like a hard lump under the skin.
• A protuberant joint in a plant.
• Any knob, lump, swelling, or protuberance.
• The swelling of the bulbus glandis in members of the dog family, Canidae.
• The point on which the action of a story depends; the gist of a matter.
• A node (point at which the lines of a funicular machine meet from different angular directions)
• A kind of epaulet; a shoulder knot.
• A group of people or things.
• A bond of union; a connection; a tie.
• A unit of speed, equal to one nautical mile per hour.
• A unit of indicated airspeed, calibrated airspeed, or equivalent airspeed, which varies in its relation to the unit of speed so as to compensate for the effects of different ambient atmospheric conditions on aircraft performance.
• A nautical mile.
• The bulbus glandis.
• One of a variety of shore birds; red-breasted sandpiper (variously Calidris canutus or Tringa canutus).

Verb

Verb Forms: knotted, knotting, knots

• To tie or intertwine threads or ropes.
• make into knots; make knots out of
  • "She knotted her fingers"
• tie or fasten into a knot
  • "knot the shoelaces"
• tangle or complicate
• To form into a knot; to tie with a knot or knots.
• To form wrinkles in the forehead, as a sign of concentration, concern, surprise, etc.
• To unite closely; to knit together.
• To entangle or perplex; to puzzle.
• To form knots.
• To knit knots for a fringe.

Examples

• A knot can be defined as a non-self-intersecting broken line whose endpoints coincide: when such a knot is constrained to lie in a plane, then it is simply a polygon.
• Cedric claimed his old yacht could make 12 knots.
• Climbers must make sure that all knots are both secure and of types that will not weaken the rope.
• I got into a knot when I inadvertently insulted a policeman.
• In the early stages of reentry, due to the extremely-rarefied air at these altitudes, the space shuttle flew at only one to a few knots equivalent airspeed, even when its actual speed was many thousands of knots.
• Jeremy had a knot on his head where he had bumped it on the bedframe.
• She knotted her brow in concentration while attempting to unravel the tangled strands.
• Sometimes players KNOT their words together beautifully, creating long chains across the board.
• the knot of the tale
• The nurse was brushing knots from the protesting child's hair.
• We knotted the ends of the rope to keep it from unravelling.
• When preparing to tell stories at a campfire, I like to set aside a pile of pine logs with lots of knots, since they burn brighter and make dramatic pops and cracks.

Synonyms

air mile, burl, Calidris canutus, gnarl, grayback, greyback, international nautical mile, mi, mile, naut mi, nautical mile, ravel, slub, tangle, attach, baffle, bind, confuse, flummox, join, kn, knit, kt, nm, put together, tie

Antonyms

unknot, unravel, loosen, unbind, untie

Related Words

braid, bruise, hickey, knit, loop, plait, shake, tangle, tie, weave