Tortuous \Tor"tu*ous\, a. [OE. tortuos, L. tortuosus, fr. tortus
a twisting, winding, fr. torquere, tortum, to twist: cf. F.
tortueux. See Torture.]
1. Bent in different directions; wreathed; twisted; winding;
as, a tortuous train; a tortuous leaf or corolla.
[1913 Webster]
The badger made his dark and tortuous hole on the
side of every hill where the copsewood grew thick.
--Macaulay.
[1913 Webster]
2. Fig.: Deviating from rectitude; indirect; erroneous;
deceitful.
[1913 Webster]
That course became somewhat lesstortuous, when the
battle of the Boyne had cowed the spirit of the
Jakobites. --Macaulay.
[1913 Webster]
3. Injurious: tortious. [Obs.]
[1913 Webster]
4. (Astrol.) Oblique; -- applied to the six signs of the
zodiac (from Capricorn to Gemini) which ascend most
rapidly and obliquely. [Obs.] --Skeat.
[1913 Webster]
Infortunate ascendent tortuous. --Chaucer.
The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48
tortuous
adj 1: highly involved or intricate; "the Byzantine tax structure";
"convoluted legal language"; "convoluted reasoning";
"intricate needlework"; "an intricate labyrinth of
refined phraseology"; "the plot was too involved"; "a
knotty problem"; "got his way by labyrinthine
maneuvering"; "Oh, what a tangled web we weave"- Sir
Walter Scott; "tortuous legal procedures"; "tortuous
negotiations lasting for months" [syn: Byzantine, convoluted,
intricate, involved, knotty, labyrinthine, tangled]
2: marked by repeated turns and bends; "a tortuous road up the
mountain"; "winding roads are full of surprises"; "had to
steer the car down a twisty track" [syn: twisting, twisty,
winding]
3: not straightforward; "his tortuous reasoning"
WordNet (r) 2.0
139 Moby Thesaurus words for "tortuous":
Gongoresque, Johnsonian, affected, ambagious, ambiguous,
anamorphous, anfractuous, askew, asymmetric, bedizened, bent,
big-sounding, billowing, billowy, bowed, circuitous,
circumlocutory, cockeyed, complicated, contorted, convoluted,
convolutional, cranky, crazy, crooked, crumpled, crunched, curled,
curling, curvaceous, curvate, curvated, curve, curved, curvesome,
curviform, curvilineal, curvilinear, curving, curvy, deceptive,
declamatory, deviative, devious, distorted, elevated, euphuistic,
flamboyant, flaming, flashy, flaunting, flexuose, flexuous,
fulsome, garish, gaudy, geosynclinal, grandiloquent, grandiose,
grandisonant, high-flowing, high-flown, high-flying, high-sounding,
highfalutin, incurvate, incurvated, incurved, incurving, indirect,
inkhorn, intricate, involute, involuted, involutional, involved,
irregular, labyrinthine, lexiphanic, lofty, lopsided, lurid,
magniloquent, mazy, meandering, meandrous, meretricious,
misleading, nonsymmetric, one-sided, orotund, ostentatious,
overdone, overelaborate, overinvolved, overwrought, pedantic,
pompous, pretentious, recurvate, recurvated, recurved, recurving,
rhetorical, rivose, rivulose, roundabout, ruffled, sensational,
sensationalistic, sententious, serpentine, showy, sinuate, sinuose,
sinuous, snaky, sonorous, sprung, stilted, tall, torsional,
tortile, tricky, turning, twisted, twisting, twisty, undulant,
unstraightforward, unsymmetric, wandering, warped, wavy, whorled,
winding, wreathlike, wreathy, zigzag
Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0
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