Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index To braid is to interweave or twine three or more separate strands of one or more materials in a diagonally overlapping pattern. This generally creates a strand or rope that is larger and stronger than the strands would have been separately. As a verb, the term also refers to styling one's hair by such braiding, or a more metaphorical braiding such as He braided the many different ideas into a new whole. As a noun, braid refers to any object created by such weaving, particularly if it remains in a strand or rope-like configuration. Braids are studied mathematically in braid theory, a special field of knot theory. In fiber optics, braid is a sheath made of braided strands of metal placed around a fiber optic cable for grounding purposes. This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by fixing it. This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.