This morning my necklace was tangled and I asked my husband to help me untangle it. Well, you know Shu. That suddenly got him thinking, what is the difference between untangle, disentangle and detangle. When I look them up, untangle and disentangle seem to be synonyms, but detangle seems to mean to remove snarls from your hair. Thought?

You have to have hair in order to detangle it.

I do not de tangle or any other Latin dance.

So is does "detangle" only refer to getting the snarls out of hair? I remember doing that when my kids were little.

Funny I just spent an hour yesterday trying to find a comb with very widely-spaced tines (no luck), & that word detangle was suggested many times.

I did find a suggestion on dictionary.com that it's a synonym for untangle. When I checked etymology, etymonline did not have the word. But this forum discussion quotes an OED etymology referencing hairdressing, first seen in 1979.

Yes, OneLook lists only two dictionaries that define detangle: Oxford Dictionaries ("Remove tangles from (hair).") and Dictionary.com ("to remove tangles, untangle"). The OED Online defines it as "To remove tangles from (hair)," and the first citation is from 1979: "Five attachments that style, shape and detangle the hair." That citation is also in bethree5's link.

It appears to me that this is a word invented by the hair products industry. They apparently didn't want to use untangle,disentangle or unsnarl). Rather, it seems they wanted a word all their own that refers specifically to hair (though the Dictionary.com definition doesn't so specify}.

Yes, I checked OED, and it does cite it from 1979. I am skeptical, however. It seems older than that. I know when Shu has worked for OED to find original citations, he has found that often they don't have the earliest cite.

Untangle, detangle disentangle. The solution is bald.

Or dreads.

I dred baldness.

Isn't another word for bald dreadnought?

Only if you give a ship.