Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Full of twists and turns; tortuous.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Winding; full of windings and turnings; sinuous.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Winding; full of windings and turnings; sinuous; tortuous.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective
sinuous ,twisty ,winding . - adjective
craggy ,rugged ,coarse ,rough ,uneven .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective full of twists and turns
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word anfractuous.
Examples
-
The impression is of extraordinary constriction, claustrophobia, and a somber beauty; these warped and anfractuous rocks formed half a planet's life ago.
President Garfield's "spine, removed during autopsy, was passed around to jurors during the trial of his assassin." Ann Althouse 2005
-
I should mention that I found it via an anfractuous Googlepath that began with this No-sword post about a great Kyoto University Digital Library exhibition.
-
Thin, anfractuous highways and dirt roads scarred the green and brown landscape, and as far as the eye could reach were to be seen farmhouses and barns and silos.
Quill's Window George Barr McCutcheon 1897
-
It is not likely to forget them -- not likely to be unreminded of the old story of the Serpent, in the false words, subtle, gliding invasions, and anfractuous policy of Abraham Lincoln.
-
Alan Greenspan famously compared the anfractuous world of anti-trust regulations to the absurdity of Alice's adventures in Wonderland.
OpenMarket.org Alex Nowrasteh 2010
-
It is true that reality is anfractuous and the paths of the world are strewn with broken glass; that is why I refer to myself as a quasi-Oakeshottian or a quasi-Burkean.
-
Evolution still insists on including certain classes that are simply no fun to drive, though, and attempting to persuade catatonic big rigs around an anfractuous Gordian knot of narrow dirt roads remains a torturous exercise in futility.
-
- Medicine, abatement of symptoms; Music, tuning to lower pitch. anfractuous adj. - winding, tortuous
xml's Blinklist.com 2008
-
The world's a lab'rinth, whose anfractuous ways Are all compos'd of rubs and crook'd meanders:
-
The ACoC allows programs like Alpha and Fresh Expressions, but its intent is to capitalise on the success of such programs by making use of the techniques while altering the content to something that fits the ACoC’s anfractuous view of reality.
reesetee commented on the word anfractuous
sinuous, winding
March 7, 2007
jmjarmstrong commented on the word anfractuous
JM went here and there, hither and thither, round and about and all over the place to find the meaning of anfractuous
February 19, 2009