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vocabulary
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convoluted
in a sentence
grouped by contextual meaning

show 10 more with this conextual meaning
  • She believes in some kind of convoluted conspiracy theory.
    convoluted = complex
  • He decided it was too convoluted to bother fixing.   (source)
  • Unwilling to let McCandless go, I spent more than a year retracing the convoluted path that led to his death in the Alaska taiga, chasing down details of his peregrinations with an interest that bordered on obsession.   (source)
  • Nowadays, Langdon hesitated even to mention the Knights Templar while lecturing because it invariably led to a barrage of convoluted inquiries into assorted conspiracy theories.   (source)
  • She was a thoughtful, well-read young woman, with opinions on a variety of topics such as the responsibility that came with Britain's military power, the nature of commerce and industry under a monarchy, how to care for the poor and neglected, the sensationalist tendencies of the Fleet Street papers, and the convolutions of the legal system as exposed by the eminent author Charles Dickens.   (source)
    convolutions = complexities
  • My life is a convoluted web of lies.   (source)
    convoluted = complex
  • father and son did a magnificent, convoluted black-power soul handshake called the "dap," the kind of handshake that lasts five minutes, fingers looping, thumbs up, thumbs down, index fingers collapsing, wrists snapping, bracelets tingling.   (source)
    convoluted = complicated
  • James is known, of course, as a master, perhaps the master, of psychological realism; if you want massive novels with sentences as long and convoluted as the Missouri River, James is your man.   (source)
    convoluted = complex
  • His eyes were vivid with real interest now, trying — again — to unravel the convoluted workings of my mind.   (source)
  • She had such a need to believe in him that even though we corresponded at a time when I loved the multi-syllabic words and convoluted sentences she had been able to ignore the obvious.   (source)
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show 5 more with this conextual meaning
  • It was an odd spell; the phrasing was obscure and convoluted, and Eragon was unable to determine what it was supposed to accomplish.   (source)
  • Have you ever listened to the way you talk? You're so frigging. . . convoluted . . . that's what you are. You talk like you were writing one of your stupid papers.   (source)
    convoluted = complex (hard to understand)
  • "A convoluted process," the Italian said with a laugh.   (source)
    convoluted = complex
  • They sat together for an hour or two, until Saphira had digested her meal and Eragon was tired of deciphering the convoluted sentences of Heslant the Monk.   (source)
  • …assistance to the medium's subjectivity so that it might find a mirror in reality, but rather—at least partially, at least tentatively—certain "selves" from outside, from beyond, got mixed up in things; what they were dealing with—possibly, though never expressly admitted—were nonvital elements, entities that used the convoluted, furtive opportunity of the moment to return to matter and manifest themselves to whoever called them—in short, the spiritualistic conjuring of the dead.   (source)
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show 10 more with this conextual meaning
  • She is studying brain convolutions and fissures.
    convolutions = complex folds and twists
  • The cerebral cortex is highly convoluted.
    convoluted = having complex folds and twists
  • Doon knelt down beside a clump of stones. He ran a finger over their convoluted surface.   (source)
    convoluted = having many complicated ridges
  • Grandfather's been dead for all these years, but if you lifted my skull, by God, in the convolutions of my brain you'd find the big ridges of his thumbprint.   (source)
    convolutions = twists and folds
  • His favorite item was a root so convoluted he never tired of looking at it.   (source)
    convoluted = complexly twisted and folded
  • After diagonally crossing the crypt, the group entered a dimly lit foyer and began winding through a convoluted series of hallways and dead ends.   (source)
    convoluted = complexly turning
  • His route is so convoluted that it seems for a time as if he has no destination in mind.   (source)
    convoluted = having complex turns
  • At the heart of it, magnified by the curved surface, there was a strange, pink, convoluted object that recalled a rose or a sea anemone.   (source)
    convoluted = twisted and folded
  • he held her tighter and ran the tip of his tongue along her cheek and onto the lobe of her ear and along the lovely convolutions to the sweet, firm rim at the top,   (source)
    convolutions = curves and folds
  • The door was open behind them, held back by a big pink conch shell with hints of sea sunsets in its smooth inner convolutions.   (source)
    convolutions = twists and folds
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show 8 more with this conextual meaning
  • If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions—why, that is something like it.   (source)
    convolutions = complex twists and patterns
  • It [a long strap] passed in many convolutions about my limbs and body,   (source)
    convolutions = twists and folds
  • Arya and Blodhgarm stayed as close beside him as the convoluted passageway would allow.   (source)
    convoluted = complexly turning
  • The striated tongues of rock twisted in such convoluted patterns that the eye had difficulty following a single piece from base to tip, but rather flitted from one coil to the next.   (source)
    convoluted = coiled, twisted and folded
  • First to the left, then to the right, and then to the left again he ran as the passage alternated directions, the convoluted path designed to slow the advance of troops if they managed to gain access to the keep.   (source)
    convoluted = complexly turning
  • Compared to the normal brain, Algernon's had decreased in weight and there was a general smoothing out of the cerebral convolutions as well as a deepening and broadening of brain fissures.   (source)
    convolutions = curves and folds
  • I believe in that myself because it has been explained by competent men as the convolutions of the grey matter.   (source)
    convolutions = twists and folds
  • The committal of homicide or suicide during sleep by an aberration of the light of reason, the incommensurable categorical intelligence situated in the cerebral convolutions.   (source)
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show 10 more examples with any meaning
  • I wondered what poor souls were stuck out there right now, what convoluted paths had led them to be struggling against the elements, alone and cold somewhere.†   (source)
  • Like I'd had one of those bad, convoluted, unexplainable fever dreams.†   (source)
  • He wonders whether to tell the judge the whole convoluted story, about his great-grandmother's letter that never made it to Cambridge, and about pet names and good names, about what had happened on the first day of kindergarten.†   (source)
  • Harold cried convolutedly.†   (source)
  • BB made a convoluted gesture with his hands.†   (source)
  • I wondered if my convoluted questions even made sense.†   (source)
  • On his desk is an inkstand of Byzantine convolution and splendour.†   (source)
  • This was quite complex because of a number of convolutions or tortuous areas in the dura and in the dural plains between their brains, as well as a large, abnormal artery running between the two brains which had to be sectioned.†   (source)
  • The logic was convoluted, we realized, but it somehow made us both feel better.†   (source)
  • They had picked two dozen salmon from the net, three stray sticks, two dogfish, a long convoluted coil of kelp, and a number of ensnarled jellyfish when Carl Heine's face showed.†   (source)
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show 46 more examples with any meaning
  • The critics had called the result "engaging" and "good, spooky fun," except for the ones who'd deemed it "preposterous" and "convoluted."†   (source)
  • Why was my reality convoluted?†   (source)
  • Six of Nasuada's guards were present-two stationed by the entrance and four behind Nasuada-and Eragon detected the convoluted pattern of Elva's dark and twisted thoughts from where the witch-child was hidden at the far end of the pavilion.†   (source)
  • What was I doing embroiled in this convoluted intrigue?†   (source)
  • While inside the vaulting of the ribs between his knees the darkly meated heart pumped of who's will and the blood pulsed and the bowels shifted in their massive blue convolutions of who's will and the stout thighbones and knee and cannon and the tendons like flaxen hawsers that drew and flexed and drew and flexed at their articulations and of who's will all sheathed and muffled in the flesh and the hooves that stove wells in the morning groundmist and the head turning side to side and…†   (source)
  • Shopping around for the cheapest policy, a process that had been convoluted and time-consuming, was suddenly made simple.†   (source)
  • It was getting so that they couldn't flush the head without a computer command…The Dallas' course track showed up as a convoluted red line, with tick marks displayed at fifteen-minute intervals.†   (source)
  • The TV channel list was almost as long, and the hotel map was so convoluted, divided into so many subsections, I couldn't make sense of it.†   (source)
  • And the feel of raised seams across the fingertips, cloth contours like road bumps under the knuckle joints—how the whorled cotton can be seen as a magnified thumbprint, a blowup of the convoluted ridges on the pad of your thumb.†   (source)
  • Dan succeeded in bypassing the convoluted communication loop and communicated straight to one of the helos.†   (source)
  • Got a little convoluted, to say the least.†   (source)
  • That she'd tried to understand and make sense of the convoluted journey he'd taken to get here seemed nothing short of miraculous.†   (source)
  • The deck was huge, the design on the backs of the cards convoluted.†   (source)
  • He ended up building all those convoluted rationales for lofty ambition, saying he needed to go to a famous college, a place everyone had heard of, to justify all of his painful sacrifices.†   (source)
  • Now there was an interesting thread in her convoluted web of relationships.†   (source)
  • Her sentences, when she was uncomfortable, became uncharacteristically formal, and sometimes dangerously convoluted.†   (source)
  • There were times when, as he sat at State Department or Defense Department meetings, and looked around the table, he saw nothing more than a dozen gray, convoluted brains sitting on the table.†   (source)
  • The routings are convoluted to the point of being untraceable.†   (source)
  • First, as usual, he would call the personal injury lawyer they'd hired to look after the convoluted legal farce Grace's accident seemed destined to become.†   (source)
  • Sitting in her corner, quietly spinning thread on her spindle or embroidering the collars on her fiancé's shirts, she'd listened to him as he struggled to follow his father's convoluted plans, gloating at every opportunity for treason and character assassination.†   (source)
  • It was the beginning of a long, convoluted crystallization that would prevent me from serving in Vietnam.†   (source)
  • Endless, convoluted incest.†   (source)
  • I dreamed aimless, convoluted dreams of the sort which all my life have seemed to be a recurrent specialty—dreams within dreams of ludicrous pursuit, of a quest for some unnamable prize taking me to unknown destinations: up steep angular stairways, by rowboat down sluggish canals, through cockeyed bowling alleys and labyrinthine railroad yards (where I saw my adored English professor at Duke, fully clad in his tweeds, standing at the controls of a rapidly moving switch engine), across…†   (source)
  • Rome was a flea market of borrowed gods and conquered peoples, a bargain basement on two floors, earth and heaven, a mass of filth convoluted in a triple knot as in an intestinal obstruction.†   (source)
  • Two days later they came to the first of a series of bluffs carved eons earlier into convolutions, pockets, blank dark eyes.†   (source)
  • He comes in as a tourist or a businessman and then the convoluted process of making contact begins.†   (source)
  • It was a day he would remember as long as he could remember for the rest of his convoluted life.†   (source)
  • A convoluted process I sincerely believe only your man could have negotiated.†   (source)
  • And what I've figured out about bad, convoluted, unexplainable dreams of any kind is that you've just got to shake them off.†   (source)
  • I chopped, diced, and added such ingredients as Eliot's control of imagery, Dylan Thomas's feel for place, Delmore Schwartz's sense of doom, Steve Tem's touch of horror, Salmud Brevy's plea for innocence; Daton's love of the convoluted rhyme scheme, Wu's worship of the physical, and Edmond Ki Fererra's radical playfulness.†   (source)
  • He laughed at my convoluted sentence.†   (source)
  • Alexander Conklin replaced the phone, his nonexistent foot throbbing, his thoughts so convoluted he had to close his eyes again to find a consistent strain.†   (source)
  • He's been trying to tell you that for weeks in perfectly lucid English — I suspect too lucid for your convoluted mentality.†   (source)
  • I'd been there, seen the station and its convoluted, interpenetrating layers, seen where Strigan had worked and lived, seen the things she'd left behind when one day, for no reason anyone seemed to know, she'd bought passage on five different ships and then disappeared.†   (source)
  • Stick to the convoluted narrative that would become clearer to the subject in stages once he made his first moves, which he had to make because you were gone.†   (source)
  • If I'm to go down with either a crazed assassin or a convoluted lunatic who displays certain decencies, I imagine it's best to choose the latter.†   (source)
  • "But our beauty lies," explained Metzger, "in this extended capacity for convolution.†   (source)
  • There was width to the eye, a smoking sun-hazed amplitude, the world convoluting and opening into the world, hill and plain, into the west.†   (source)
  • And then his father came up beside him where he stood before a tattered last year's circus poster on the other side of the store, gazing rapt and quiet at the scarlet horses, the incredible poisings and convolutions of tulle and tights and the painted leer of comedians, and said, "It's time to eat."†   (source)
  • In Eugene's fantasy there burned the fixed vision of the great hands clasped across the sea, the flowering of green fields, and the developing convolutions of a faery London—mighty, elfin, old, a romantic labyrinth of ancient crowded ways, tall, leaning houses, Lucullan food and drink, and the mad imperial eyes of genius burning among the swarm of quaint originality.†   (source)
  • Analysis and introspection might come later; but for the moment she was not even troubled by the excesses of the upholstery or the restless convolutions of the furniture.†   (source)
  • The muscles round his lips contracted into an unconscious grimace that tore through the mask of his usual expression—something violent, short-lived and illuminating like a twist of lightning that admits the eye for an instant into the secret convolutions of a cloud.†   (source)
  • Lying in strange folds, courses, and convolutions, to their apprehensions, it seems more in keeping with the idea of his general might to regard that mystic part of him as the seat of his intelligence.†   (source)
  • My brain it shall be your occult convolutions!†   (source)
  • This glaze of God's serenest purest sky, This film of Satan's seething pit, This heart's geography's map, this limitless small continent, this soundless sea; Out from the convolutions of this globe, This subtler astronomic orb than sun or moon, than Jupiter, Venus, Mars, This condensation of the universe, (nay here the only universe, Here the idea, all in this mystic handful wrapt;) These burin'd eyes, flashing to you to pass to future time, To launch and spin through space revolving…†   (source)
  • O little shells, so curious-convolute, so limpid-cold and voiceless, Will you not little shells to the tympans of temples held, Murmurs and echoes still call up, eternity's music faint and far, Wafted inland, sent from Atlantica's rim, strains for the soul of the prairies, Whisper'd reverberations, chords for the ear of the West joyously sounding, Your tidings old, yet ever new and untranslatable, Infinitesimals out of my life, and many a life, (For not my life and years alone I…†   (source)
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