tortured

1. 1
   adjective

   Having been subjected to deliberate physical or mental pain inflicted by another.

   The tortured detainees bore scars from months of abuse.

   Investigators interviewed the tortured hostages about their captivity.

   Similartormented, abused

   Note

   Here the participle settles into an adjective that describes a person by what was done to them. In H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898), the narrator says others cannot know "what is possible to tortured men." The phrase names a lasting condition rather than an event. To tell it from the verb form, look at position: before a noun (tortured men) it is the adjective, and after was or were it is usually the passive verb.

2. 2
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of torture.

   The regime tortured dissidents in secret prisons.

   Many prisoners were tortured before any trial took place.

   Note

   A regular form: torture simply adds -d, and that one spelling serves as both the simple past and the participle. Only the words around it tell them apart: they tortured him, he was tortured, they have tortured. Because the verb takes a direct object, it readily turns passive. The same spelling also works as an adjective that compares (more tortured, most tortured), and that is where the adjective for a victim begins.

3. 3
   adjective

   Involving or marked by suffering and difficulty.

   Their tortured relationship finally ended after years of arguments.

   The negotiations followed a long, tortured path to a final agreement.

   Similartroubled, tormented, painful, difficult

   Oppositeuntroubled, smooth

4. 4
   adjective

   Of writing, burdened by needless complexity and made obscure or hard to follow.

   Reviewers criticized the novel's tortured prose and tangled metaphors.

   The report's tortured phrasing buried its findings under needless jargon.

   Similarconvoluted, labored, strained, contorted, tortuous

   Oppositeclear, lucid, simple, straightforward

   Note

   The furthest the word travels: from tortured people, through a troubled, painful history, to tortured prose. Here the suffering belongs to the sentence, which its writer has twisted out of shape, and the reader inherits the strain. It is always a word of censure. Calling prose tortured says the difficulty was needless and the writer's fault, not that the subject itself was hard.

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