means Twisted together into knots or confusion, whether of threads, hair, wires, or arguments, in a way that resists easy separation.

from From 'tangle,' which surfaced in Middle English as 'tangilen' — likely borrowed from a Scandinavian source, a cousin of dialectal Swedish 'taggla,' meaning to disorder or entangle. The original sense leaned toward seaweed and matted growth; the figurative 'tangled web' of confusion came later, helped along by writers who noticed that physical knots and moral ones snarl in much the same way.