Tortuosity
noun ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 tortuousness; tortuous condition or nature. countable, uncountable
- 2 a tortuous and twisted shape or position wordnet
- 3 Crookedness. countable, uncountable
"So far from seeking to "pettifogulise"—i.e., to find evasions for any purpose in a trickster's minute tortuosities of construction—exactly in the opposite direction, from mere excess of sincerity, most unwillingly I found, in almost everybody's words, an unintentional opening left for double interpretations."
- 4 A property of curve being tortuous, commonly used to describe diffusion in porous media. countable, uncountable
Example
More examples"So far from seeking to "pettifogulise"—i.e., to find evasions for any purpose in a trickster's minute tortuosities of construction—exactly in the opposite direction, from mere excess of sincerity, most unwillingly I found, in almost everybody's words, an unintentional opening left for double interpretations."
Etymology
From tortuo(u)s + -ity, from Latin tortuositas; compare French tortuosité.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.