tortuous

Word family

1 SGBENDa tortuous path, stream, road etc has a lot of bends in it and is therefore difficult to travel along 〔路、溪流等〕弯弯曲曲的，曲折的

a tortuous path over the mountains to Kandahar

翻山越岭通往坎大哈的一条蜿蜒小径

2 COMPLICATEDcomplicated and long and therefore confusing 转弯抹角的，绕圈子的；复杂的；令人费解的

The book begins with a long, tortuous introduction.

这本书的开头是一篇冗长、晦涩的前言。

—tortuously adverbadv

Examples from the Corpus

tortuous• Your progress is slow and tortuous.• The legal ramifications of the Hains case are tortuous.• But it has been a tortuous and cumbersome journey.• His rather tortuous explanation seems to come to this.• Most of the villages are accessible only by boat or along tortuous jungle trails.• a tortuous mountain trail• It took six months of tortuous negotiations to reach an agreement.• At last, an end to the tortuous negotiations was in sight.• They walked on, wandering through a warren of tortuous passageways where the noise and stench grasped Athelstan by the throat.• It was a tortuous, switchback ride.• The people came from Bosanska Gradiska, 35 miles away on a twisting, tortuous track through the Snake Mountains.• a twisting, tortuous track through the Snake Mountains

Origin tortuous

(1300-1400) Old French tortueux, from Latin tortuosus, from tortus; → TORTURE1

Chinese

Syllable

Corpus