tangle

To mix together or intertwine.

To become mixed together or intertwined.

Her hair was tangled from a day in the wind.

By the afternoon it seemed as if the storm had passed and that frost was setting in; but in the evening the wind rose to gale force, bringing telegraph poles down like skittles and tangling power and telephone lines.

To enter into an argument, conflict, dispute, or fight.

Don't tangle with someone three times your size.

He tangled with the law.

To catch and hold.

tangled in amorous nets

When my simple weakness strays, / Tangled in forbidden ways.

A tangled twisted mass.

A complicated or confused state or condition.

I tried to sort through this tangle and got nowhere.

Economics is a messy discipline: too fluid to be a science, too rigorous to be an art. Perhaps it is fitting that economists’ most-used metric, gross domestic product (GDP), is a tangle too. GDP measures the total value of output in an economic territory. Its apparent simplicity explains why it is scrutinised down to tenths of a percentage point every month.

An argument, conflict, dispute, or fight.

A region of the projection of a knot such that the knot crosses its perimeter exactly four times.

A paired helical fragment of tau protein found in a nerve cell and associated with Alzheimer's disease.

Any large type of seaweed, especially a species of Laminaria.

[…] if with thee the roaring wells ⁠Should gulf him fathom-deep in brine; ⁠And hands so often clasp’d in mine, Should toss with tangle and with shells.

You've never smelled the tangle o' the Isles.

An instrument consisting essentially of an iron bar to which are attached swabs, or bundles of frayed rope, or other similar substances, used to capture starfishes, sea urchins, and other similar creatures living at the bottom of the sea.

Any long hanging thing, even a lanky person.