What is "writhen"

Usage examples of "writhen".

When, however, the little insignificant figure we have described approached so nigh as to receive some interruption from the warders, he dashed his dusky green turban from his head, showed that his beard and eyebrows were shaved like those of a professed buffoon, and that the expression of his fantastic and writhen features, as well as of his little black eyes, which glittered like jet, was that of a crazed imagination.

You did not issue from this side into the hedged-in garden, but were immediately in the open, in sight of the steep mountain meadows, dotted with single fir-trees of moderate size, and writhen, stunted pines.

She was restlessly ranging there, with her pacing step, her legs bent at the knee-joints, wrapped in a black cashmere shawl, a black veil wound about her disordered silver hair and tied under her chin, her ageing face, with the large writhen mouth, gleaming dead-white against her mourning.

There was a plucked fowl, with its long writhen neck hanging down from a table among a setting of vegetables.

He turned toward his visitor that kingly countenance, with the sore, writhen mouth and the pale little eyes under the arabesque of lines on the brow.

His poor deformed body was like that of Punchinello, a part for which he was famous in the theatres--protuberant before, hunched up between his shoulders behind, and set upon little writhen fleshless legs like wooden spigots.

Can it be France, an army of France, tricked, netted, convulsive, all writhen caught?

The Armenian boy whispered up on slippered feet, bearing on a gaudy salver a tiny beaker of coffee clenched in a writhen silver zarf.

Thus at last they drew near the Fourth Gate, the Gate of Writhen Iron.

And the deeps rose beneath them in towering anger, and waves like unto mountains moving with great caps of writhen snow bore them up amid the wreckage of the clouds, and after many days cast them away upon the shores of Middle-earth.

Only a few withered, writhen trunks, here and there, told of the labor that had made it and the hopes that had been planted with it.

Down at the bottom a globule of gold gave off light, a tiny bright mass like a writhen body, perhaps twenty grains in weight.

Plunge loomed until it seemed to pour from the heart of the range, bearing the private thunder of mountains in its writhen turmoil.

The ceiling rose high, supported by many beams carved ingeniously into writhen shapes of branches and leaves.

The smell of spring was in the air, and filmy silvery mist had begun to float off the dark bogland in vanishing wreaths, soft and dim as the frail sloe-blossom, already stolen out over the writhen black branches up on the ridge.