고 설키다

tangled together, hopelessly intertwined

This is the second half of the fixed pair 얽히고설키다 — 얽히다 "be entangled" plus 설키다, a word that appears in essentially nothing else. It describes things knotted together so you can't pull them apart. Every line here uses it figuratively: M&A deals, a pile of problems, a long entangled personal history, a region with a complicated past. It is written both as two words and as one, and the examples show both spellings.