tortuous
Often confused with torturous
- 1Full of twists and turns; winding, or, figuratively, convoluted and hard to follow.
The bus crawled up a tortuous mountain road with a sheer drop on one side.
After a tortuous approval process involving three separate agencies, the bridge finally opened.
Similarwinding, twisting, convoluted, serpentine, meandering
Oppositestraight, direct, straightforward
Note
Latin tortus, "a twisting, winding", gives the picture: a badger's tortuous hole, the tortuous curves of early Tube lines that followed the streets above. Figuratively it suits processes and arguments that wind on, like a disability claim moving through four hearings. It is easily mixed up with torturous, which means painful; a tortuous process is long and twisting, not necessarily agonizing.
- 2In astrology, oblique: describing the six signs of the zodiac from Capricorn to Gemini, which ascend most rapidly and most obliquely.
The astrologer frowned to find the ascendant tortuous at the moment the ship set sail.
An ascendant in one of the tortuous signs, such as Pisces or Taurus, was counted unfortunate.
Similaroblique
Note
Astrologers split the zodiac by how its signs rise. Seen from northern latitudes, the six from Capricorn to Gemini cross the horizon quickly and at a slant, and were called tortuous; the other six rise slowly and more upright. Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe, in Walter William Skeat's edition of 1872, counts an ascendant tortuous as unfortunate.
- 3Injurious or wrongful, in the way a tort is.
Note
An old use that meant what tortious means today: harmful in the way a legal wrong is harmful. The two ideas now go by different spellings, so a wrongful act is tortious while a winding road or process is tortuous, and tortuous written for the legal sense is read as a misspelling.
Practice
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Origin
From Middle English tortuous, tortuose, from Anglo-Norman and Old French tortuos, from Latin tortuōsus, from tortus ("a twisting, winding").