Definitions

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  • noun Plural form of tortuosity.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • We had a delicious gallop over the sands to the Waiakea river, which we crossed, and came upon one of the vast lava-flows of ages since, over which we had to ride carefully, as the pahoehoe lies in rivers, coils, tortuosities, and holes partially concealed by a luxuriant growth of ferns and convolvuli.

    The Hawaiian Archipelago Isabella Lucy 2004

  • The Parliament believed, and rightly, that in arresting this man under other pretexts, it would find the thread of many curious and secret tortuosities, which would aid its design, and that it might plume itself upon protecting the public safety against the tyranny of secret arrests and private imprisonments.

    Court Memoirs of France Series — Complete Various

  • All the bodily defects and deformities that orthopedy treats, give but a feeble idea of the humps, the tortuosities, the dislocations we have inflicted upon ourselves in order to depart from simple common sense; and at our own expense we learn that one does not deform himself with impunity.

    The Simple Life Charles Wagner

  • His face was his fortune: it was all changeful nature: his eye glistened and rolled, and lit up alternately every corner of his laughing face: "then the eternal tortuosities of his nose, and the alarming descent of his chin, contrasted, as it eternally was, with the portentous rise of his eyebrows."

    The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction Volume 19, No. 534, February 18, 1832 Various

  • His mind was concrete and moved with difficulty in regions of the abstract; but, even when he could not follow the reasoning, it gave him a curious pleasure to follow the tortuosities of thoughts that threaded their nimble way on the edge of the incomprehensible.

    Of Human Bondage 1919

  • His mind was concrete and moved with difficulty in regions of the abstract; but, even when he could not follow the reasoning, it gave him a curious pleasure to follow the tortuosities of thoughts that threaded their nimble way on the edge of the incomprehensible.

    Of Human Bondage 1915

  • He had been the bridge over that chasm in the cycles; the Path through all the tortuosities of that doubtful and wayward time; over which the

    The Crest-Wave of Evolution A Course of Lectures in History, Given to the Graduates' Class in the Raja-Yoga College, Point Loma, in the College-Year 1918-19 Kenneth Morris 1908

  • Later she might fathom the tortuosities of her tyrant's mind.

    The Madigans Miriam Michelson 1906

  • By virtue of this reaction it is that the shams and ceremonies we may fancy mere curious survivals, mere kinks and tortuosities, cloaks and accessories to-day, will, if we are silent and acquiescent, be halfway to reality again in the course of a generation.

    Mankind in the Making 1906

  • He pursues soul in all its rich multiplicity, in the tortuosities and dark abysses of character; he forces crowds of sordid, grotesque, or commonplace facts to become its expressive speech; he watches its thought and passion projected into the tide of affairs, caught up in the clash and tangle of plot.

    Robert Browning Herford, C H 1905

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