TORTUOUS • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Tortuous

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/tˈɔrtʃəwəs/ Listen

adjective

Tortuous adj.

Bent in different directions; wreathed; twisted; winding; as, a tortuous train; a tortuous leaf or corolla. "The badger made his dark and tortuous hole on the side of every hill where the copsewood grew thick."

Fig.: Deviating from rectitude; indirect; erroneous; deceitful. "That course became somewhat lesstortuous, when the battle of the Boyne had cowed the spirit of the Jakobites."

Injurious: tortious. (Obs.)

(Astrol.) Oblique; applied to the six signs of the zodiac (from Capricorn to Gemini) which ascend most rapidly and obliquely. (Obs.) "Infortunate ascendent tortuous."

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Etymology of 'Tortuous'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Tortuous" Quotes from Famous Books

... not in that Provence where even the saddest stories are gay. Consider the lamentable history of Peire Vidal. Two years ago Florence and I motored from Biarritz to Las Tours, which is in the Black Mountains. In the middle of a tortuous valley there rises up an immense pinnacle and on the pinnacle are four castles—Las Tours, the Towers. And the immense mistral blew down that valley which was the way from France into Provence so that the silver ...

— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford

... to the tortuous talker is a supreme test of patience. He slowly winds his way in and out of a subject. He traverses by-paths, allowing nothing to escape his unwearied eye. He goes a long way about, but never tires of his circuitous journey. Ploddingly and perseveringly he zigzags from one point to ...

— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser

... of the debt owed by England and the empire to Lord Milner for the inflexible determination with which he penetrated, unmasked, and finally baffled the tortuous diplomacy of the Boer commissioners may be estimated from the fact that within three months of the signing of the Surrender Agreement at Pretoria, three out of their number asked the British Government to re-open the discussion and make, what Mr. Chamberlain rightly ...

— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold

... three degrees. Captain Wickham and the surgeon visited an inlet near the ship to-day, which had indeed been looked into, but not explored before. They proceeded to the south-west for about three miles, through a very tortuous channel, dry in many parts at low-water, thickly studded with mangrove bushes, over and through which the tide made its way at high-water, giving to that part of the country the appearance of an extensive morass. A slightly elevated table-topped range ...

— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes

... mightiest man-of-war. Many and many a gully, half choked with stones and briers, lurks under the base of an overtopping hill, and shows where a forgotten Undine lived and loved. The hills still bear the scars of their wounds. No soft-springing greenness veils the tortuous processes. Uncompromising and terrible, the marks of their awful rending, the agony of their fiery birth, shall remain. Time, the destroyer of man's works, is the perfecter of God's. These ravages are not Time's; they ...

— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton

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