A knot of threads, or other thing, united confusedly, or so interwoven as not to be easily disengaged; a snarl; as, hair or yarn in tangles; a tangle of vines and briers. Used also figuratively.
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.
In mathematics, an n-tangle is a proper embedding of the disjoint union of n arcs into a 3-ball. The embedding must send the endpoints of the arcs to 2n marked points on the ball's boundary. Two n-tangles are considered equivalent if there is an ambient isotopy of one tangle to the other keeping the boundary of the 3-ball fixed.