knot
/nɑt/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: 3.72 in modern English
8
Scrabble Score
4
Letters
1
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
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.
noun
A maze-like pattern.
noun
A non-self-intersecting closed curve in (e.g., three-dimensional) space that is an abstraction of a knot (in sense 1 above).
noun
A tightened and contracted part of a muscle that feels like a hard lump under the skin.
Example Sentences
- "Climbers must make sure that all knots are both secure and of types that will not weaken the rope."
- "The obstructive tendency attributed to the knot in spiritual matters appears in a Swiss superstition that if, in sewing a corpse into its shroud, you make a knot on the thread, it will hinder the soul of the deceased on its passage to eternity."
- "The nurse was brushing knots from the protesting child's hair."
- "Flowers worthy of paradise, which, not nice art / In beds and curious knots, but nature boon / Poured forth profuse on hill, and dale, and plain."
- "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."
- "I got into a knot when I inadvertently insulted a policeman."
Etymology
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.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: knotte, cnotta, *knottō, *knuttô, *gnod-
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /nɑt/
- British English: /nɒt/