Gnarl
WordNet
noun
(1) Something twisted and tight and swollen
"Their muscles stood out in knots"
"The old man's fists were two great gnarls"
"His stomach was in knots"
verb
(2) Make complaining remarks or noises under one's breath
"She grumbles when she feels overworked"
(3) Twist into a state of deformity
"The wind has gnarled this old tree"
WiktionaryText
Noun
- a knot in wood; a large or hard knot, or a protuberance with twisted grain, on a tree.
- something resembling a knot in wood, such as in stone or limbs.
- The average value of the magnitude squared of the curl of a vector field over a continuous path that is tangent to the vector field at every point. In mathematical notation, gnarl is represented by the lowercase Greek letter ξ.