knotty

knotty
    adj 1: making great mental demands; hard to comprehend or solve
           or believe; "a baffling problem"; "I faced the knotty
           problem of what to have for breakfast"; "a problematic
           situation at home" [syn: {baffling}, {elusive}, {knotty},
           {problematic}, {problematical}, {tough}]
    2: used of old persons or old trees; covered with knobs or
       knots; "gnarled and knotted hands"; "a knobbed stick" [syn:
       {gnarled}, {gnarly}, {knotted}, {knotty}, {knobbed}]
    3: highly complex or intricate and occasionally devious; "the
       Byzantine tax structure"; "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"- Sir Walter Scott;
       "tortuous legal procedures"; "tortuous negotiations lasting
       for months" [syn: {Byzantine}, {convoluted}, {involved},
       {knotty}, {tangled}, {tortuous}]
    4: tangled in knots or snarls; "a mass of knotted string";
       "snarled thread" [syn: {knotty}, {snarled}, {snarly}]
    

Knotty \Knot"ty\, a. [Compar. {Knottier}; superl. {Knottiest}.]
   1. Full of knots; knotted; having many knots; as, knotty
      timber; a knotty rope.
      [1913 Webster]

   2. Hard; rugged; as, a knotty head. [R.] --Rewe.
      [1913 Webster]

   3. Difficult; intricate; perplexed.
      [1913 Webster]

            A knotty point to which we now proceed --Pope.
      [1913 Webster]
    

88 Moby Thesaurus words for "knotty":
      Byzantine, Herculean, abstruse, arduous, beyond one, brutal,
      burled, complex, complicated, crabbed, cramp, critical, daedal,
      delicate, demanding, difficile, difficult, effortful, elaborate,
      exacting, formidable, garbled, gnarled, gnarly, gordian, hairy,
      hard, hard to understand, hard-earned, hard-fought, intricate,
      involved, jawbreaking, jumbled, knobbed, knobbly, knobby, knoblike,
      knotted, knurled, knurly, laborious, labyrinthine, lumpy, mean,
      no picnic, nodal, noded, nodiform, nodose, nodular, nodulated,
      noduled, not easy, nubbled, nubbly, nubby, obfuscated, obscure,
      obscured, operose, overtechnical, perplexed, rigorous, rough,
      rugged, scrambled, set with thorns, severe, sophisticated, spiny,
      steep, sticky, strenuous, studded, terrible, thorny, ticklish,
      toilsome, torose, tough, tricky, tubercular, tuberculous, tuberose,
      tuberous, uphill, wicked