tortuous

tortuous
    adj 1: highly complex or intricate and occasionally devious;
           "the Byzantine tax structure"; "Byzantine methods for
           holding on to his chairmanship"; "convoluted legal
           language"; "convoluted reasoning"; "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}, {involved}, {knotty},
           {tangled}, {tortuous}]
    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: {tortuous},
       {twisting}, {twisty}, {winding}, {voluminous}]
    3: not straightforward; "his tortuous reasoning"
    

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.
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            The badger made his dark and tortuous hole on the
            side of every hill where the copsewood grew thick.
                                                  --Macaulay.
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   2. Fig.: Deviating from rectitude; indirect; erroneous;
      deceitful.
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            That course became somewhat lesstortuous, when the
            battle of the Boyne had cowed the spirit of the
            Jakobites.                            --Macaulay.
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   3. Injurious: tortious. [Obs.]
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   4. (Astrol.) Oblique; -- applied to the six signs of the
      zodiac (from Capricorn to Gemini) which ascend most
      rapidly and obliquely. [Obs.] --Skeat.
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            Infortunate ascendent tortuous.       --Chaucer.
      [1913 Webster] --{Tor"tu*ous*ly}, adv. --
      {Tor"tu*ous*ness}, n.
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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