The Collaborative International Dictionary
Tortuous \Tor"tu*ous\, a. [OE. tortuos, L. tortuosus, fr. tortus a twisting, winding, fr. torquere, tortum, to twist: cf. F. tortueux. See Torture.]
-
Bent in different directions; wreathed; twisted; winding; as, a tortuous train; a tortuous leaf or corolla.
The badger made his dark and tortuous hole on the side of every hill where the copsewood grew thick.
--Macaulay. -
Fig.: Deviating from rectitude; indirect; erroneous; deceitful.
That course became somewhat lesstortuous, when the battle of the Boyne had cowed the spirit of the Jakobites.
--Macaulay. Injurious: tortious. [Obs.]
-
(Astrol.) Oblique; -- applied to the six signs of the zodiac (from Capricorn to Gemini) which ascend most rapidly and obliquely. [Obs.]
--Skeat.Infortunate ascendent tortuous.
--Chaucer. [1913 Webster]
-- Tor"tu*ous*ly, adv. -- Tor"tu*ous*ness, n.
Wiktionary
adv. In a tortuous manner.
WordNet
adv. in a tortuous manner; "tortuously haggling over the price"
Usage examples of "tortuously".
Excretory ducts uniting to form a tube which tortuously perforates the cuticle at 3, and opens obliquely on its surface at 4.
Greg began to move, a tortuously slow sidestroke, kicking hard with his feet.
The road wound north from Index and then east along the north fork of the Snohomish River and past the Troublesome Creek Campground and the San Juan Campground to Garland Mineral Springs before it meandered tortuously south back to Jack Pass and Highway 2.
That was when the ill-favored and ill-regarded Themistocles chose, somewhat tortuously, to interpret the phrase wooden walls to mean wooden ships.
CHAPTER VI THE PASSING OF NEW FRANCE AND THE DREAM OF ITS REVIVAL The readers who have through these chapters been companions of Champlain, La Salle, Joliet, Marquette, and others in the discovery of the mighty rivers and the conquest of the mighty vastnesses of the new world will have, if they continue, yet before them even harder and more disheartening ventures, as La Salle himself had that April day in 1682, when he turned from the column which he had planted in sight of the Gulf of Mexico, four thousand miles from the Cape of Labrador, and began to drive his canoes up the river which he had traced forever, if too tortuously, on the maps of the earth.
X has been in this business more than twenty years now, and the share that finds its way tortuously to him must be considerable, after deducting his pay ments to appointed and elected persons and their staffs.
Yatima was receiving gestalt tags broadcast by the cathode-ray tube icon, packed with supplementary information, but Orlando was tortuously reading the same things in linear text from a translation window pasted into the scape by his exoself.