KNOTTY • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Knotty

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/nˈɑti/ Listen

Knotty

adjective

(compar. knottier; superl. knottiest)

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"

Used of old persons or old trees; covered with knobs or knots. Synonyms: gnarled, gnarly, knobbed, knotted. "A knobbed stick"

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"

Tangled in knots or snarls. Synonyms: snarled, snarly. "Snarled thread"

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"Knotty" Quotes from Famous Books

... the neatly-planted forest of paper-trees spread knotty, alien branches, trying to catch the rays of the winter-waning sun. Whenever Wang thought of his grandfather's remarks about his ancestors, he always wondered, as a corollary, what those same ancestors would have thought about a forest growing ...

— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett

... again, and put the money into his mother's knotty hand. She counted it, with eyes which satisfied themselves fiercely that each coin was of genuine silver—and then ...

— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins

... yet reached the yonder bank when we set forward through a wood which was marked by no path. Not green leaves but of a dusky color, not smooth boughs but knotty and gnarled, not fruits were there but thorns with poison. Those savage beasts that hold in hate the tilled places between Cecina and Corneto have no thickets so rough or ...

— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri

... notable exception. He gave me one technical principle, expressed in a few simple exercises, which I have never heard of from any one else. The use of this principle has helped me amazingly to conquer many knotty passages. I have never given these exercises to any one; I am willing however, to jot them down ...

— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower

... but they didn't answer. The little people always had been shy. Yet without reaching a decision in so many words I knew suddenly that I had to talk to them. I'd come to the glen to work out a knotty problem, and I was up against a blank wall. Simply because I was so lonely that ...

— Houlihan's Equation • Walt Sheldon

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