entanglement

From entangle +‎ -ment.

• IPA^(key): /ɪnˈtæŋɡəlmənt/

• Audio (Southern England):

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entanglement (countable and uncountable, plural entanglements)

1. The act of entangling.
   • 2002, David Robertson, David Professor Robertson, A Dictionary of Modern Politics, Psychology Press, →ISBN, page 266:

     The most notorious of these was his entanglement of the Soviet Union in the Cuban missile crisis, against the advice of the military, who held him responsible for their embarrassing inability to frighten the USA because he had failed […]

2. The state or condition of being entangled; intricate and confused involution.
   1. The condition of being deeply involved and intricated (with politics, a group, another person, etc.)
      • 2018 June 30, Katrina O'Loughlin, Women, Writing, and Travel in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 110:

        The Letters' account of Dolghurucki's hopeless entanglement in the politics of the imperial accession resonated with her readers, and Vigor's story becomes a minor set piece of Russian histories in the eighteenth century.

   2. The condition, or an instance, of being romantically or sexually involved with another person; an affair.
      • For quotations using this term, see Citations:entanglement.
3. That which entangles; an involvement, a complication; an intricacy; a perplexity.
   1. (military) An obstruction placed in front or on the flank of a fortification, to impede an enemy's approach.
   2. (nautical) An obstruction of cables and spars across a river or harbour entrance.
4. (physics) Ellipsis of quantum entanglement.
   • 2014 November 14, David Kaiser, “Is Quantum Entanglement Real?”, in New York Times‎^[1]:

     In his article, Bell demonstrated that quantum theory requires entanglement; the strange connectedness is an inescapable feature of the equations.

• entangler
• entangling

• “entanglement”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.
• “entanglement”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
• entanglement on Wikipedia.Wikipedia