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Knotty   /nˈɑti/   Listen
Knotty

adjective
(compar. knottier; superl. knottiest)
1.
Making great mental demands; hard to comprehend or solve or believe.  Synonyms: baffling, elusive, problematic, problematical, tough.  "I faced the knotty problem of what to have for breakfast" , "A problematic situation at home"
2.
Used of old persons or old trees; covered with knobs or knots.  Synonyms: gnarled, gnarly, knobbed, knotted.  "A knobbed stick"
3.
Highly complex or intricate and occasionally devious.  Synonyms: Byzantine, convoluted, involved, tangled, tortuous.  "Byzantine methods for holding on to his chairmanship" , "Convoluted legal language" , "Convoluted reasoning" , "The plot was too involved" , "A knotty problem" , "Got his way by labyrinthine maneuvering" , "Oh, what a tangled web we weave" , "Tortuous legal procedures" , "Tortuous negotiations lasting for months"
4.
Tangled in knots or snarls.  Synonyms: snarled, snarly.  "Snarled thread"



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"Knotty" Quotes from Famous Books



... that the eye never becomes tired of admiration. Often have I halted on my journey to ride around and admire the prodigious height and girth of these trees. Their beautiful proportions render them the more striking; there are no gnarled and knotty stems, such as we are accustomed to admire in the ancient oaks and beeches of England, but every trunk rises like a mast from the earth, perfectly free from branches for ninety or a hundred feet, straight as an arrow, each tree forming a dark ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker

... burning. It was lonely, lifeless, that white plain under that burnished sky; and he was all alone, the black fellow on the snow. And he saw the world so big, so monotonously bleak; a flat, white wilderness, with here and there a straight, thin poplar and a row of black, lean, knotty willows. ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels

... enough to interest any one; and, with the certain instinct of a child, he drifted toward the man whose heart was open to him. Many a day, as Kenna split some blocks of wood that were over big and knotty for the official axeman, Jim would come to watch and marvel at the mighty blows. His comments told of the imaginative power born ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton

... in all the different ways that could be thought of—upside down, wrong end first, inside out, fore-and-aft, and "thort-ships,"—and then know what to do on gray nights when it hadn't any shape at all. So I set about it. In the course of time I began to get the best of this knotty lesson, and my self-complacency moved to the front once more. Mr. Bixby was all fixed and ready to start it to the rear again. He opened on me after ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... was a meeting fairly under way, than some young scamp would rise and solemnly move the previous question, which never failed to bring down a storm of hoots at the complete mystification of the perplexed chairman, who never to his last day was able to solve this knotty point ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson


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