Crossword clues for tenuous
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Tenuous \Ten"u*ous\, a. [L. tenuis thin. See Thin, and cf. Tenuis.]
Thin; slender; small; minute.
Rare; subtile; not dense; -- said of fluids.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1590s, "thin, unsubstantial," irregularly formed from Latin tenuis "thin, drawn out, meager, slim, slender," figuratively "trifling, insignificant, poor, low in rank," from PIE root *ten- "to stretch" (cognates: Sanskrit tanuh "thin," literally "stretched out;" see tenet) + -ous. The correct form with respect to the Latin is tenuious. The figurative sense of "having slight importance, not substantial" is found from 1817 in English. Related: Tenuously; tenuousness.
Wiktionary
a. 1 Thin in substance or consistency. 2 insubstantial
WordNet
Usage examples of "tenuous".
If it did - the idea was very tenuous - the archivist might remember the man who had drawn that file.
That new continuity is always too tenuous, too unstable, and does not offer sorcerers the assuredness they need to function as if they were in the world of everyday life.
She felt a connection, but a tenuous one, perhaps attenuated by the sphere of force.
It looked like every place else: a tenuous patch of hot magnetized plasma tens of thousands of kilometers deep.
They spoke, too, of the Multifold, but that equally tenuous entity was said to be strung like a veil among the crush of stars and radiant clouds.
It felt vaguely like holding my hand against a recirculating outlet in a swimming poolit was a tenuous thing, that felt like it might easily slide to one side.
She might even in time become strong enough to have a tenuous mental bond with another village, as some of the Merging Selves did.
For nearly 600 years, between the collapse of the Abbasid Empire in the thirteenth century and the waning years of the Ottoman era in the late nineteenth century, government authority was tenuous and tribal Iraq was, in effect, autonomous.
He took a deep, shuddering breath and gathered himself to face Abel on his own, his control still tenuous.
A tenuous aerogel foam bubbled and farted, rushing out into a ballooning mass as the dog lunged forward, teeth snapping, making a soft growling sound deep in its throat.
This interplay of hues begins with the appearance of a tenuous brushstroke of lavender on the horizon.
Further within this energy envelope are layers of tenuous matter called the atmospheric strata: exosphere, ionosphere, mesosphere, stratosphere, and troposphere.
The tidal-locked Ly-cilph world coasted along seventy thousand kilometres above the tenuous outer fringes of the magnetosphere, beyond the reach of the worst radiation.
As her connection with the twentieth and twenty-first centuriesnot to mention reality in generalis somewhat tenuous, she had no other choice but to become a writer of fantastic fiction.
Buffon criticized the Linnaean method for relying upon characters so tenuous that it rendered the use of the microscope unavoidable.