pretzel

Pluralpretzels

Formspretzels

1. 1
   nouncountable

   A toasted or baked bread or cracker, usually formed in the shape of a loose knot.

   The vendor handed me a warm pretzel sprinkled with coarse salt.

   Soft pretzels are a popular snack at German festivals.

   Note

   The knot explains the name. Dialectal German Pretzel, a variant of standard Brezel, goes back through Old High German to a Vulgar Latin diminutive of brachium, "arm", because the twisted dough looks like a pair of folded arms. Its usual companion shows in Elizabeth Robins Pennell's Our Philadelphia (1914), which remembers a beer garden where a pretzel might be had with a glass of beer.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   Any object or mass that has been knotted, twisted, or tangled together.

   The garden hose lay in a pretzel by the back door.

   Her earphone wires always end up a tangled pretzel in her pocket.

   Similartangle, knot, snarl, twist

   Note

   Here the snack's shape becomes a figure of speech for anything wound up on itself, from a garden hose to a person. It fits neatly into the frame "a pretzel of a ...", as in Alice Hegan Rice's Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (1901): "he drew himself up into a regular pretzel of a boy." The image is still the twisted dough of the baked knot.

3. 3
   verbcolloquialCanadaUStransitive

   To bend, twist, or contort something into a tangled or knotted shape.

   Acrobats can pretzel their limbs into shapes that look painful.

   She pretzeled the copper tubing to fit the tight corner.

   Similartwist, bend, contort

   Oppositestraighten, untangle

   Note

   An informal North American verb, coined straight from the noun's twisted shape. Its spelling divides the way many verbs ending in -el do. American usage writes pretzeled and pretzeling, while British style doubles the l, as in a snake pretzelled into knots. Because it is informal, it suits lively description of bodies and limbs rather than formal or technical prose.

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