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  1. tortuous love

Definitions

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

  1. adj. Having or marked by repeated turns or bends; winding or twisting: a tortuous road through the mountains.
  2. adj. Not straightforward; circuitous; devious: a tortuous plot; tortuous reasoning.
  3. adj. Highly involved; complex: tortuous legal procedures.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. Full of twists or turns; winding; hence, crooked; zigzag. Geometers apply the word specifically to curves of which no two successive portions lie in one plane.
  2. Oblique: applied in astrology to the six zodiacal signs which ascend most rapidly and obliquely.
  3. Figuratively, circuitous; devious; irregular; crooked: especially in a moral sense.
  4. Synonyms Sinuous, serpentine, curvilinear, circuitous, indirect, roundabout.
  5. An obsolete variant of tortious.

Wiktionary

  1. adj. Twisted; having many turns; convoluted.
  2. adj. obsolete injurious; tortious
  3. adj. astrology oblique; applied to the six signs of the zodiac (from Capricorn to Gemini) that ascend most rapidly and obliquely

GNU Webster's 1913

  1. adj. Bent in different directions; wreathed; twisted; winding.
  2. adj. Fig.: Deviating from rectitude; indirect; erroneous; deceitful.
  3. adj. obsolete Injurious: tortious.
  4. adj. (Astrol.), obsolete Oblique; -- applied to the six signs of the zodiac (from Capricorn to Gemini) which ascend most rapidly and obliquely.

WordNet 3.0

  1. adj. marked by repeated turns and bends
  2. adj. not straightforward
  3. adj. highly complex or intricate and occasionally devious

Etymologies

  1. From Latin tortuosus, from tortus ("a twisting, winding"). (Wiktionary)
  2. Middle English, from Anglo-Norman, from Latin tortuōsus, from tortus, a twisting, from past participle of torquēre, to twist (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)

Examples

  • “The 47-year-old Nigerian immigrant and Woodbridge resident says she escaped what she called a tortuous relationship nine years ago, nearly became homeless, and she is now the owner of Certified Skilled Nursing Services and Associates Inc. in Dumfries.”

    News for InsideNova.com

  • “Winds and seismic and tectonic disruptions have left their mark in tortuous folds and uplifts, deep gashes, and conical incrustations that hark back far before the age of human folly.”

    Pakistan’s Fatal Shore

  • “And if it takes the best legal minds at DOJ and the Whitehouse MONTHS to come up with "innovative" legal logic that justifies the current NSA program (as they have claimed), how thin and tortuous is that logic?”

    Balkinization

  • “Tortoise harks back to the Latin _tortus_, meaning twisted (hence our word tortuous) and came to be applied to these slow creatures because of their twisted legs.”

    The Log of the Sun A Chronicle of Nature's Year

  • “Above all she was natural -- that was indubitable now; more natural than he had supposed at first, perhaps on account of her aesthetic toggery, which was conventionally unconventional, suggesting what he might have called a tortuous spontaneity.”

    The Lesson of the Master

  • “But her voice breaks and she dabs at her eyes occasionally when she recalls the tortuous path she followed from Monterey in the northern Mexican state of Nuevo Leon to”

    Durangoherald.com

  • “It makes me wonder if Gonzales and Yoo head up a child porno ring to remain silent on this, they too must be engaging in some filthy 'tortuous' child predator activities.”

    Handy Timeline Of Foleygate Scandal

  • “It took Mr. McNeil six "tortuous" months before he was able to run the entire distance.”

    The Wall Street Journal: Prepping for 50- and 100-Mile Races

  • “The local district attorney, Elizabeth Scheibel, charged nine students with a variety of crimes, including stalking, harassment and statutory rape, saying they had made Prince's last day alive "tortuous".”

    The Sydney Morning Herald News Headlines

  • “CALGARY - A Calgary mother fighting to free her son from the American foster system says she hopes the "tortuous" two-year separation could finally come to an end this summer.”

    Dose.ca Music briefs

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synonyms (8)

Words with the same meaning

  1. wreathed
  1. twisted
  1. winding
  1. indirect
  1. erroneous
  1. deceitful
  1. oblique
  1. sinuous

equivalents (3)

Other words for ‘tortuous’

  1. crooked
  1. indirect
  1. complex

same context (20)

Words that are found in similar contexts

  1. devious
  2. circuitous
  3. steep
  4. rutted
  1. sinuous
  2. precipitous
  3. hilly
  4. labyrinthine
  1. muddy
  2. intricate
  3. interminable
  4. unfrequented
  1. perilous
  2. crook
  3. narrow
  4. subterranean
  1. toilsome
  2. tree-lined
  3. pave
  4. tedious

reverse dictionary (39)

Words that contain this word in their definition

  1. torturous
  2. tortuous
  3. meander
  4. convoluted
  5. convolution
  6. tortuosity
  7. tortuousness
  1. ram-goat
  2. roundaboutness
  3. screwy
  4. sinuous
  5. anfractuous
  6. vermiculate
  7. torsion
  1. tortuously
  2. varicosity
  3. twist
  4. tortue
  5. contortion
  6. crookedness
  7. tortuoslty
  1. twistical
  2. devious
  3. fusinæ
  4. insinuation
  5. roundabout
  6. scolite
  7. serpent
  1. serpentine
  2. sinuate
  3. pathfinder
  4. tunnel
  5. varicose
  6. varix
  7. vermetus
  1. vermicular
  2. wrench
  3. wrest
  4. writhe

tags (1)

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  1. SATWOTD

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‘tortuous’ has been looked up 3820 times, loved by 4 people, added to 64 lists, and has a Scrabble score of 8.