knot

CEFRB2

/nɒt/

noun

Türkçe translations

Translating…

In plain English

  1. 01

    noun

    A fastening made by tying together a piece of rope or string.

  2. 02

    noun

    A tight, difficult problem or tangled mass.

Examples

  • Bill was single until he tied the knot last week.

  • This knot will not hold.

At a glance

Sits at B2 on the CEFR scale

Senses
5
Parts of speech
1
Citations
5
Synonyms
5

Deep Dive

noun

Extra meanings

  1. A maze-like pattern.

  2. A tangled clump of hair or similar.

  3. 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.

More examples

In context

  • Climbers must make sure that all knots are both secure and of types that will not weaken the rope.

  • The nurse was brushing knots from the protesting child's hair.

  • 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.

Synonyms

Antonyms

Quick test

Two questions on this entry. Nothing is scored.

Question 1 · Quick check

The careful carpenter smoothed the rough blank on the old wooden plank.

Practise this properly in the app, where the word comes back before you forget it.

Nearby

Origin

noun

From Middle English knotte, from Old English cnotta, from Proto-West Germanic *knottō, from Proto-Germanic *knuttô, *knudô (“knot”); probably ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *gnod- (“to bind”). See also Old High German knoto (German Knoten, Dutch knot, Low German Knütte; also Old Norse knútr > Danish knude, Swedish knut, Norwegian knute, Faroese knútur, Icelandic hnútur; also Latin nōdus and its Romance descendants. Doublet of knout, node, and nodus. * (unit of speed): From the practice of counting the number of knots in the logline (as it is paid out) in a standard time. Traditionally spaced at one every ¹⁄₁₂₀ of a mile.