The word was recorded in English by the 1620s, from Latin. John Donne, the poet and Dean of St Paul's Cathedral, used it to describe sin wrapped and twisted within sin.
Latin gave English the word directly, without passing through French. The Latin verb meant 'to fold together', describing something twisted or interwoven.
Behind that Latin verb lay two parts, a prefix meaning 'together', and a second element meaning 'to fold, or weave'. That second element traces to a Proto-Indo-European root, *plek-, meaning 'to plait'.
REPLY and PLIABLE share the same root. REPLY entered English in the late fourteenth century, from a Latin verb meaning 'to fold back'. PLIABLE entered English around the same time, from Old French, describing something easily bent.
In 1664, the physician and early microscopist Henry Power used the word to describe eels lying dead, twisted together like a tangled knot, in his book Experimental Philosophy. By 1690, the philosopher John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, used the word to describe how a non-simple idea, such as an army, or the universe, was formed by combining many simpler ideas.
