Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Gnarled; misshapen.
- adjective Characterized by violent motion; powerful or turbulent.
- adjective Unpleasant or difficult.
- adjective Remarkable; outstanding.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Having rough or distorted knots.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Full of knots; knotty; twisted; crossgrained.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective having or characterized by
gnarls ;gnarled - adjective US slang
dangerous - adjective US slang
unpleasant ,awful ,ugly - adjective slang
excellent ,attractive - adjective US slang Of music or a sound, harsh
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective used of old persons or old trees; covered with knobs or knots
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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A tube can be rigged to reach bass in gnarly cover, to pick off cruisers in open water, or to coax strikes from even the most finicky bedding bass.
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"I know you don't hear the word gnarly too much in conservative circles, but you're gonna start hearing it in the future!" the 44-year-old ex-actor told a crowd of about 200 assembled youths.
The New Republic - All Feed Lydia DePillis 2010
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"I know you don't hear the word gnarly too much in conservative circles, but you're gonna start hearing it in the future!" the 44-year-old ex-actor told a crowd of about 200 assembled youths.
The New Republic - All Feed Lydia DePillis 2010
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"I know you don't hear the word gnarly too much in conservative circles, but you're gonna start hearing it in the future!" the 44-year-old ex-actor told a crowd of about 200 assembled youths.
The New Republic - All Feed Lydia DePillis 2010
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Thea Andrews, joking, "1891 Victorian England was a petty gnarly place -- I like that I actually got the word gnarly in a Victorian description."
The IESB 2009
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The long and narrow peninsulas of the Midcoast region, which stretch from the Brunswick / Bath area through to the Camden / Rockland area, are often described as gnarly fingers that stretch into the sea.
xml's Blinklist.com 2008
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It's important that us whites call gnarly looking black women beautiful, because we must, or we aren't human otherwise.
Ace of Spades HQ 2009
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Yep, had a buddy place three cams near his feeders in Sept. Had some pic's of some "gnarly" deer.
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No word yet on cause of death, but since he was just in Africa, we can only assume he had the ebola virus, or the hanta virus, or salmonella, or some kind of gnarly rhino wound.
SOME DUDE JUST DIED 2008
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Now that I've gotten the whole Twitter thing out of the way, I find myself wishing that the fiasco that is Bike Month was also out of the way, since things are getting pretty bad or "gnarly," as they say in singletrack-slaying parlance out there.
Illusions: Fake Twitters and Strange Looks BikeSnobNYC 2009
bilby commented on the word gnarly
"They cannot be too gnarly and crabbed and rusty to look at. The gnarliest will have some redeeming traits even to the eye. You will discover some evening redness dashed or sprinkled on some protuberance or in some cavity. It is rare that the summer lets an apple go without streaking or spotting it on some part of its sphere. It will have some red stains, commemorating the mornings and evenings it has witnessed; some dark and rusty blotches, in memory of the clouds and foggy, mildewy days that have passed over it; and a spacious field of green reflecting the general face of Nature,--green even as the fields; or a yellow ground, which implies a milder flavor,--yellow as the harvest, or russet as the hills." - 'Wild Apples', Henry David Thoreau.
December 14, 2007
avivamagnolia commented on the word gnarly
~ Something (or someone) both obscure and hairy.
"Yow! - the tuned assembler implementation of BitBlt is really gnarly!"
~ From a similar but less specific usage in surfer slang.
January 18, 2009