knotty
Adjective Satellite
- making great mental demands; hard to comprehend or solve or believe
- "I faced the knotty problem of what to have for breakfast"
- used of old persons or old trees; covered with knobs or knots
- highly complex or intricate and occasionally devious; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; - Sir Walter Scott
- "a knotty problem"
- tangled in knots or snarls
Adj
- Of string or something stringlike: full of, or tied up, in knots.
- Of a part of the body, a tree, etc.: full of knots (knobs or swellings); gnarled, knobbly.
- Complicated or tricky; complex, difficult.
- Of an austere or hard nature; rugged.
Adjective
- Full of knots; difficult and complex.
Examples
- a knotty pine
- a knotty problem
- Solving a KNOTTY Scrabble problem often requires visualizing multiple word possibilities.
Origin / Etymology
From Middle English knotti, knotty (“having a knot in it; full of knots; tied together (?); resembling a knot, knotlike; having knobs or protuberances; bulging, convex; of a tree, branch, etc.: full of knots, gnarled; of a plant cutting to be grafted or planted: full of buds or eyes; having joints (?); having swollen joints; of flesh: glandular; of flesh: granular, lumpy, especially, having many swellings; mangy, scurfy (?); having pimples (?); of cauterization: carried out on glandular tissue; (figuratively) of a question or problem: difficult, intricate”) [and other forms], from knotte (“knot; pattern of intersecting lines; coil of a snake”) (from Old English cnotta (“knot”), from Proto-Germanic *knuttô (“knot”), possibly from Proto-Indo-European *gnod- (“to bind”)) + -i (suffix forming adjectives from nouns). The English word may be analysed as knot + -y (suffix forming adjectives with the sense ‘having the quality of’).
Cognates
* Dutch knoestig (“knotty”)
* German knotig (“knotty”)
* Swedish knotig, knutig (“knotty”)
Synonyms
baffling, Byzantine, convoluted, elusive, gnarled, gnarly, involved, knobbed, knotted, problematic, problematical, snarled, snarly, tangled, tortuous, tough, Gordian, complex, complexed, complicate, complicated, intricate, involutional, knotty, labyrinthal, labyrinthine, manifold, thorny
Antonyms
Scrabble Score: 13
knotty: valid Scrabble (US) TWL Wordknotty: valid Scrabble Word in Merriam-Webster MW Dictionary
knotty: valid Scrabble Word in International Collins CSW Dictionary