What is "abstruse"

Usage examples of "abstruse".

After several minutes of giving polite attention I realized that I had opened a tap behind which stood a full ocean of information, each datum more abstruse than the last, and that Ulwy Munt was not inclined to hinder its flow.

The manner of language, of style and of expression has considerably changed since then, the old abstruse complex sentence with its hidden meanings has been relegated to the shade, there is little of prolixity or long-drawn-out phrases, ambiguity of expression is avoided and the aim is toward terseness, brevity and clearness.

When Fluellen urges him to join in a discussion of some abstruse points of military science, Macmorris rightly refuses, insisting that this is not the time.

In China, it had already proliferated into a number of abstruse metaphysical sects, within bodi the Hinayana and Mahayana schools, that could scarcely have appealed to the Japanese beyond a small circle of intellectuals at court.

Here were his poetry books and the abstruse volumes of philosophy Lukan had given him when he was a student.

You start abstruse doubts, cavils, and objections: You ask me, what is the cause of this cause?

Settlers and Spacers may be rivals in some abstruse, long-term struggle none of us shall ever live to see the results of--but we are also all human beings, and we can learn from each other.

Your objections, I must freely tell you, are no better than the abstruse cavils of those philosophers who denied motion.

And he goes on to add, in a passage full of the peculiar melancholy beauty of his prose, and full too of instruction for the biographer, "But if, in after-time, I have sought a refuge from bodily pain and mismanaged sensibility in abstruse researches, which exercised the strength and subtlety of the understanding without awakening the feelings of the heart, there was a long and blessed interval, during which my natural faculties were allowed to expand and my original tendencies to develop themselves – my fancy, and the love of nature, and the sense of beauty in forms and sounds.

A good many of them have devoted their lives to highly abstruse and sometimes peculiar subjects, such as Lodovicus Crudelis who toiled for thirty years translating all extant ancient Egyptian texts into both Greek and Sanscrit, or the somewhat peculiar Chattus Calvensis II who has bequeathed to us four immense folio volumes on The Pronunciation of Latin in the Universities of Southern Italy toward the End of the Twelfth Century.

He knew that the men in the house were foreignersthat even Marius, with his too-perfect English, was a foreignerand that no one but the Saint and Patricia could be expected to be familiar with the more abstruse perversions and defilements possible to the well of native English.

Mean while the Eternal eye, whose sight discerns Abstrusest thoughts, from forth his holy mount, And from within the golden lamps that burn Nightly before him, saw without their light Rebellion rising.

He was one of a handful of living entities who could actually think in the abstruse and abstract language of pure mathematics.

The game: Opus, a game for professionals, one of the only two card games to utilize all seventy-eight cards of the ancient Tarot pack (the other was Kabala, a game whose rules were so abstruse only a handful of people had succeeded in mastering it).

Did they present to him complex, obscure, and abstruse cases, perhaps something due to an enzyme deficiency isolated only last week, or a rare cranial nerve syndrome first described in l925, he should be informative and invaluable.