CUMBERSOME • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Cumbersome

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/kˈəmbərsəm/ Listen

adjective

cumbersome adj.

Burdensome or hindering, as a weight or drag; embarrassing; vexatious; cumbrous. "To perform a cumbersome obedience."

Not easily managed; as, a cumbersome contrivance or machine. "He holds them in utter contempt, as lumbering, cumbersome, circuitous."

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Etymology of 'Cumbersome'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Cumbersome" Quotes from Famous Books

... and it is true that the rebel army on that account was more easily moved than our own. It was one of the disadvantages of too liberal a government that our movements for two years were weighed down with these cumbersome trains; and even after so long an experience of their evil it was with strong feelings of opposition that the ...

— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens

... last August within a few hours. Obviously her freedom, her power for promptitude would be hindered in proportion to need for such consultation with and approval by councilors of many distant countries as is presupposed by advocates of imperial federation. Why establish control by cumbersome, superfluous machinery when the war has made it clear as the sun at high noon that the essential desideratum, British Union, exists now? All the notable communities of the King's realms have demonstrated that they are in the mind, ...

— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... more than once told me that food had mysteriously disappeared from a cave in which she kept a store of meat for our use, and she showed me where the rocks in front of this cave had been scraped of seaweed and mussel-shells as though by the passage of some cumbersome body. But I gave no heed to her anxieties, and although she urged me to shift our camp I would not leave the beacon lest a ship ...

— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes

... exhortation, instruction, and warning. But the critics in question have either believed that its chief object was to prevent the stage from ever being altogether empty, whereas in truth the stage was not at all the proper place for the Chorus; or else they have censured it as a superfluous and cumbersome appendage, expressing their astonishment at the alleged absurdity of carrying on secret transactions in the presence of assembled multitudes. They have also considered it as the principal reason with the Greek tragedians for the strict observance of the unity of place, as it could ...

— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... man - all lumber! Throw it overboard. It makes the boat so heavy to pull, you nearly faint at the oars. It makes it so cumbersome and dangerous to manage, you never know a moment's freedom from anxiety and care, never gain a moment's rest for dreamy laziness - no time to watch the windy shadows skimming lightly o'er the shallows, ...

— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome

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