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[ adjective ] making great mental demands; hard to comprehend or solve
Synonyms Examples "a baffling problem" "I faced the knotty problem of what to have for breakfast" "a problematic situation at home" Used in print (Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land....)The word `` church '' which turned_up over_and_over_again among Jubal 's words gave him knotty difficulty ; there was no Martian concept to match it - unless one took `` church '' and `` worship '' and `` God '' and `` congregation '' and many other words and equated them to the totality of the only world he had known during growing waiting & & & then forced the concept back into English in_that phrase which had been rejected ( by each differently ) by Jubal , by Mahmoud , by Digby . Related terms |
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[ adjective ] highly involved or intricate
Examples "the Byzantine tax structure" "convoluted reasoning" "intricate needlework" "the plot was too involved" "a knotty problem" "labyrinthine maneuvering" "Oh, what a tangled web we weave"- Sir Walter Scott Related terms |
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