How to Use knotty in a Sentence

knotty

adjective
  • Hank Green has been a knotty boy.
    — Bethy Squires, Vulture, 11 Sep. 2025
  • One Shuck taught her to break open like the hinge on a knotty shell.
    — Ian McNulty, NOLA.com, 2 Feb. 2021
  • Gas prices had fallen, and the roads were knotty with cars from across the world.
    — Nathan Heller, The New Yorker, 22 July 2019
  • All that showed of him was a straggly tail, a homely mug, and four knotty knees.
    — Dolores Brown, Outdoor Life, 17 June 2026
  • There are many knotty reasons for the lag in laying new power lines.
    — Aurora Almendral, Quartz, 13 Apr. 2023
  • No sense in wasting your time on flailing around to solve a knotty problem.
    — Lance Eliot, Forbes.com, 14 Aug. 2025
  • This gives the roots a knotty appearance from which its common name is derived.
    — Kim Toscano, Southern Living, 21 June 2026
  • The whirling spool snarled the line into a knotty tangle and the sprinting snook snapped it like a strand of blond hair.
    — Charles Elliott, Outdoor Life, 27 June 2024
  • Zendaya was the silver star of the show in a knotty mini-dress with fur cuffs and collars.
    — Brendan Le, PEOPLE, 30 Sep. 2025
  • The point of the board is to take knotty decisions like these out of Facebook’s hands.
    — Steven Levy, Wired, 28 Jan. 2020
  • Despite these knotty bits, Harvest stands strong and tall, a work solid as an oak.
    — Leslie Felperin, The Hollywood Reporter, 3 Sep. 2024
  • Untangling knotty problems calls for patience, and who has that these days?
    — Kc Cole, Wired, 20 Oct. 2021
  • That's a lot of frank talk before the fun stuff, but things can get a little knotty if both parties aren’t on the same page.
    — Glamour, 29 Mar. 2019
  • But her career got knottier after that.
    — Rebecca Traister, Vulture, 10 Feb. 2026
  • At 60-odd hours and counting, Game of Thrones is dense with its own knotty lore.
    — Scott Meslow, GQ, 31 July 2017
  • The all-instrumentals disc is full of knotty workouts and folk-jazz-funk fusion.
    — AL.com, 30 July 2017
  • Think of the band’s poles with earthy Americana at one extreme and freaky, knotty jams at the other.
    — Jed Gottlieb, Boston Herald, 11 Jan. 2026
  • Kids' rooms can take a lot of color, so rather than a classic knotty pine, the boys' room is green with orange accents and stripes.
    — David A. Keeps, House Beautiful, 2 Oct. 2016
  • Both sides have shown willingness to work toward an agreement, but the issues are knotty and a deal is far from a sure thing.
    — Lee Hamilton, Twin Cities, 7 Feb. 2025
  • The band’s intricate, at times proudly knotty music draws from some of the same sources as the Dead’s.
    — George Varga, San Diego Union-Tribune, 21 Oct. 2021
  • Most feature a king-size bed, wood-burning stove, plenty of knotty wood furniture, and fresh white linens.
    — Maggie Fuller, AFAR Media, 3 Jan. 2025
  • Where the two meet, bundles of the hotter stuff pierce the dusty shell, creating knotty plumes that look vaguely like comets.
    — Joseph Howlett, Scientific American, 20 Jan. 2026
  • Yet experts say the pray-for-rain approach is a risky, short-term strategy in the face of a knotty long-term problem.
    — Laura Paddison, CNN, 17 June 2024
  • Wood has a knotty history with SNL.
    — Max Goldbart, Deadline, 14 Apr. 2026
  • Is this the start of a contentious, unruly, hairy relationship that is sure to have a very knotty ending?
    — Donna Freydkin, Allure, 13 Sep. 2017
  • Gummy bears from turbine blades Vestas is far from the first to try to tackle this knotty problem.
    — Laura Paddison, CNN, 28 May 2023
  • In his crowded, knotty-pine office, several young men and women sit at desks filling out forms.
    — Nicholas Pileggi, Curbed, 15 Aug. 2025
  • But as Slofstra’s game has made clear, the universe can be far knottier than a sock drawer.
    — Quanta Magazine, 5 Mar. 2019
  • When these quickies started rolling in, Sears would work all night if necessary to attend to each knotty query.
    — Catherine Musemeche, Smithsonian Magazine, 7 July 2022
  • Many have likened the process to a long and knotty divorce – but one with 28 interested parties.
    — Nicola Slawson, The Christian Science Monitor, 3 Nov. 2017

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'knotty.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: