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Knotty   /nˈɑti/   Listen
Knotty

adjective
(compar. knottier; superl. knottiest)
1.
Making great mental demands; hard to comprehend or solve or believe.  Synonyms: baffling, elusive, problematic, problematical, tough.  "I faced the knotty problem of what to have for breakfast" , "A problematic situation at home"
2.
Used of old persons or old trees; covered with knobs or knots.  Synonyms: gnarled, gnarly, knobbed, knotted.  "A knobbed stick"
3.
Highly complex or intricate and occasionally devious.  Synonyms: Byzantine, convoluted, involved, tangled, tortuous.  "Byzantine methods for holding on to his chairmanship" , "Convoluted legal language" , "Convoluted reasoning" , "The plot was too involved" , "A knotty problem" , "Got his way by labyrinthine maneuvering" , "Oh, what a tangled web we weave" , "Tortuous legal procedures" , "Tortuous negotiations lasting for months"
4.
Tangled in knots or snarls.  Synonyms: snarled, snarly.  "Snarled thread"



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"Knotty" Quotes from Famous Books



... again, and he gazed at Robert in a sort of dazed fashion. The imagination of young Lennox was alive and leaping. He had found what seemed to him a happy solution of a knotty problem, and, as usual in such cases, his ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler

... shot-gun was but a bar of iron. How could they cope with the bullets in the automatics? Undoubtedly every smuggler carried a revolver, and would use it in a pinch; possibly some might not wait until the pinch came. It was a knotty problem. The drops oozed out on Jim's forehead as ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman

... 1907, but most of the others are still alive and busy. Union N. Bethell, now in Cutler's place at the head of the New York Company, has been the operating chief for eighteen years. He is a man of shrewdness and sympathy, with a rare sagacity in solving knotty problems, a president of the new type, who regards his work as a sort of obligation he owes to the public. And just as foreigners go to Pittsburg to see the steel business at its best; just as they go to Iowa and Kansas to see ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson

... feast is well lighted, and the guest has not to third his way through knotty sentences, past perilous punctuation-points, to reach the table, nor to grope in the dark for the dainties when he has found it. We imagine that it is this charm of perfect clearness and accessibility ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various

... minutes, each one tugging at the knotty problem. Then Cameron rose, reached out for the phial of medicine, drove his slouch-hat down over his forehead, and ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas


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