Types of knots

There are four main knots used to knot neckties. In rising order of difficulty, they are:

·         The four-in-hand knot. (The four-in-hand knot may be the most common).

·         The Pratt knot. (the Shelby knot).

·         The half-Windsor knot.

·         The Windsor knot. (also erroneously called the "double-Windsor" or, redundantly, "full Windsor"). The Windsor knot is the thickest knot of the four, since its tying has the most steps.

Other types includes:

·         The Prince Albert Knot.

·         The Atlantic Knot.

The Windsor knot is named after the Duke of Windsor, although he did not invent it. The Duke did favour a voluminous knot; however, he achieved this by having neckties specially made of thicker cloths.

In the late 1990s, two researchers, Thomas Fink and Yong Mao of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, used mathematical modeling to discover that eighty-five knots are possible with a conventional tie. (They limited the number of "moves" used to tie the knot to nine; longer sequences of moves result in too large a knot or leave the hanging ends of the tie too short).