ABSTRUSE • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Abstruse

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/əbstrˈus/ Listen

adjective

Abstruse adj.

Concealed or hidden out of the way. (Obs.) "The eternal eye whose sight discerns Abstrusest thoughts."

Remote from apprehension; difficult to be comprehended or understood; recondite; as, abstruse learning. "Profound and abstruse topics."

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Etymology of 'Abstruse'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Abstruse" Quotes from Famous Books

... years before Saint Thomas settled the Church dogma, a monk of Citeaux or some other abbey, a certain Alain of Lille, had written a Latin poem, as abstruse an allegory as the best, which had the merit of painting the scene of man's creation as far as concerned the mechanical process much as Thomas seems to have seen it. M. Haureau has printed an extract (vol. ...

— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams

... that would not move and the little city in which Hope had taken lodgings for a while, and he went to work with ruler, scale and dividers, and the hard wood template for drawing the curves he had constructed for the tangent-balance by a very abstruse mathematical calculation. That was right, at all events, only, as it was to be reversed, he laid it on the paper with ...

— The Little City Of Hope - A Christmas Story • F. Marion Crawford

... continuous chain extending from a prehistoric past to an invisible future. We have here a writer who in one chapter handles complicated statistics and economical calculations with obvious relish, and turns from them with equal pleasure to abstruse disquisitions on the filiation of ideas ...

— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... the fate of hapless lexicography, that not only darkness, but light impedes and distresses it; things may be not only too little, but too much known, to be happily illustrated. To explain, requires the use of terms less abstruse than that which is to be explained, and such terms cannot always be found; for as nothing can be proved but by supposing something intuitively known, and evident without proof, so nothing can be defined but by the use of words too ...

— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot

... that Macfarlane was a veritable storehouse of abstruse knowledge; a living dictionary, and a thinker and philosopher besides. He had at least one vanity: the claim that he knew every word in the English dictionary, and he made it good. The younger man tried repeatedly to discover a word ...

— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

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