The DICT Development Group

  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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  tortuous
       adj 1: 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, knotty, labyrinthine, tangled]
       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: twisting, twisty,
           winding]
       3: not straightforward; "his tortuous reasoning"

  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