Knotty \Knot"ty\, a. [Compar. Knottier; superl. Knottiest.]
1. Full of knots; knotted; having many knots; as, knotty
timber; a knotty rope.
[1913 Webster]
2. Hard; rugged; as, a knotty head. [R.] --Rewe.
[1913 Webster]
3. Difficult; intricate; perplexed.
[1913 Webster]
A knotty point to which we now proceed --Pope.
[1913 Webster]
The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48
knotty
adj 1: making great mental demands; hard to comprehend or solve; "a
baffling problem"; "I faced the knotty problem of what
to have for breakfast"; "a problematic situation at
home" [syn: baffling, problematic, problematical]
2: used of old persons or old trees; covered with knobs or
knots; "gnarled and knotted hands"; "a knobbed stick"
[syn: gnarled, gnarly, knotted, knobbed]
3: 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,
labyrinthine, tangled, tortuous]
[also: knottiest, knottier]
WordNet (r) 2.0
88 Moby Thesaurus words for "knotty":
Byzantine, Herculean, abstruse, arduous, beyond one, brutal,
burled, complex, complicated, crabbed, cramp, critical, daedal,
delicate, demanding, difficile, difficult, effortful, elaborate,
exacting, formidable, garbled, gnarled, gnarly, gordian, hairy,
hard, hard to understand, hard-earned, hard-fought, intricate,
involved, jawbreaking, jumbled, knobbed, knobbly, knobby, knoblike,
knotted, knurled, knurly, laborious, labyrinthine, lumpy, mean,
no picnic, nodal, noded, nodiform, nodose, nodular, nodulated,
noduled, not easy, nubbled, nubbly, nubby, obfuscated, obscure,
obscured, operose, overtechnical, perplexed, rigorous, rough,
rugged, scrambled, set with thorns, severe, sophisticated, spiny,
steep, sticky, strenuous, studded, terrible, thorny, ticklish,
toilsome, torose, tough, tricky, tubercular, tuberculous, tuberose,
tuberous, uphill, wicked
Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0
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