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Definition
marked by repeated turns and bendsor:
highly complex or intricate
- A tortuous road up the mountain
- Tortuous legal procedures
- His tortuous reasoning
- There was dancing now on the canvas in the garden; old men pushing young girls backward in eternal graceless circles, superior couples holding each other tortuously, fashionably, and keeping in the corners — and a great number of single girls dancing individualistically or relieving the orchestra for a moment of the burden of the banjo or the traps.F. Scott Fitzgerald -- The Great Gatsby
- They have gone down the highways of the South on tortuous rides for freedom.Martin Luther King, Jr. -- Letter from a Birmingham Jail
- Then he opened the car door on his side and strolled round to my side, his breath shaping tortuous smoke signals in the gray air.Sylvia Plath -- The Bell Jar
- In his moment of terrible vision he saw, in the tortuous ways of a thousand alien places, his foiled quest of himself.Thomas Wolfe -- Look Homeward, Angel
- He knew the fine old cities already as though he had trodden their tortuous streets from childhood.W. Somerset Maugham -- Of Human Bondage
- Having reached the summit of his vengeance by a long and tortuous path, he saw an abyss of doubt yawning before him.Alexandre Dumas -- The Count of Monte Cristo
- It was gravel on rock bottom, tortuous, but open, with infrequent and shallow downward steps.Zane Grey -- The Rainbow Trail
- That is a wide region of sluggish fen where the stream becomes tortuous and much divided.J.R.R. Tolkien -- The Fellowship of the Ring
- Pathfinder was as simple as the Quartermaster was practised; he was as sincere as the other was false, and as direct as the last was tortuous.James Fenimore Cooper -- The Pathfinder
- That is the tortuous method preferred, in each of the meanderings of his indefatigable novel, by the oblique Ts'ui Pên.Jorge Luis Borges -- The Garden of Forking Paths
- The second way was tortuous.Chaim Potok -- The Chosen
- Slowly, tortuously, he at last began to write an answer.J.K. Rowling -- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
- A small, dim, crooked shop, kept in a tortuous, up-hill thoroughfare, by a small, dim, crooked man.Charles Dickens -- A Tale of Two Cities
- She went out of the town by a tortuous back street, and drove slowly along, unconscious of the road and the scene.Thomas Hardy -- Far from the Madding Crowd
- The streets were narrow, tortuous, and mostly evil-smelling, with a mixture of stale fish and damp cellar odours.Baroness Orczy -- The Scarlet Pimpernel
- XX When Dick got out of the elevator he followed a tortuous corridor and turned at length toward a distant voice outside a lighted door.F. Scott Fitzgerald -- Tender is the Night
- Tortuously, through Baig, Mortenson explained his wife was expecting him home in a few days, and that all CAI projects had to be approved by the board.Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin -- Three Cups of Tea
tortuously = with repeated turns and bends
tortuous = complex or with repeated bends and turns
tortuous = marked by repeated turns and bends
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