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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
gnarly
adjective
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ On the way home, there was a gnarly car wreck on the side of the road.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Gnarly

Gnarly \Gnarl"y\, a. Full of knots; knotty; twisted; crossgrained.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
gnarly

1829, "knotted and rugged," from gnarl (see gnarled) + -y (2). Picked up 1970s as surfer slang to describe a dangerous wave; it had spread in teen slang by 1982, where it meant both "excellent" and "disgusting."

Wiktionary
gnarly

a. 1 having or characterized by gnarls; gnarled 2 (context US slang English) dangerous 3 (context US slang English) unpleasant, awful, ugly 4 (context slang English) excellent, attractive 5 (context US slang English) Of music or a sound, harsh

WordNet
gnarly

adj. used of old persons or old trees; covered with knobs or knots; "gnarled and knotted hands"; "a knobbed stick" [syn: gnarled, knotted, knotty, knobbed]

Usage examples of "gnarly".

Jack Boysenberry zipped up quickly and self-consciously and looked around at the sound of the gnarly, piping voice.

I said, and pulled my shadow out of the light on the floorboards before he saw my gnarly fingers, my bramble hair.

Behind the bars, one of the gnarly miscreations hissed at me, and the other two took it up at once and with enthusiasms low, sibilant, threatening sound.

Even now, as Jim looked around and behind him from this altitude, Lyonesse appeared to stretch to a farther horizon, with only the top of a ridge above the treescape, that would be the rock cliff-face behind which lay the passage to the lands of the Gnarly.

Therefore they can be gnarlier, nastier, more warlike Klingons than ever.

I saw a gnarly old man, his ruined face half-hid in a blizzardy white beard, his body wrapped in a brown robe.

Chancey had been trying to supplement his income by betting on the races, but he was no better at picking horses than at riding them -- he had a passion for claimers who were moving up in class, which any tout will tell you is a quick way to go broke -- and old Chancey, he was getting mighty desperate, and on this particular morning he stopped rubbing Malicious and put him in his stall, and then started trading low whispers with a gnarly little man who had just appeared in the shed row with no visitor's pass or anything, and after a couple of minutes they shook hands and the gnarly little man pricked Chancey's thumb with something sharp and then held it onto a piece of paper.

I forked up crepes in rapid succession, ignoring the gnarly bits that fell back on the plate.

And she reverently set the flowers in the crook of a gnarly black willow not far from the eerie outline of the sprawled body, spattered with blood dark as the river water.

MATILDA SADDLER first saw the gnarly man on the evening of June ~4th, 1g~6, at Coney Island.

MATILDA SADDLER first saw the gnarly man on the evening of June 14th, 1946, at Coney Island.

It couldn't have been the wowo itself that ate poor Kurt -- a wowo's just a hollow of a self-everting Klein bottle geometrized in this tasty gnarly way that Kurt dreamed up.

Remember when the Gnarly King that was had captured my young ward, he was hand in glove with Agatha Falon, half sister to my ward and someone out to get rid of the boy so that she, not he, could inherit the family wealth.

The march had toughened the prince's chief of staff to a degree the little academic would have thought flatly impossible before she'd hit Marduk, and she'd become thin and wiry as a gnarly root, with knotlike muscles rippling up and down her forearms.

A road that was little more than a track rose, fell, writhed through a darkness of deodars and gnarly wild fruit trees where langurs scampered.