How to Use tortuous in a Sentence

tortuous

adjective
  • If [the dosage] is less, [the person] will go through very tortuous scenes.
    — Sebastian Shukla, CNN, 13 Mar. 2018
  • Just to, just to bring it to the fore and remind people, uh, how, how tortuous this has been.
    — Leila Atassi, cleveland, 25 Feb. 2022
  • The typing wasn’t the only tortuous part of the writing process for her.
    — oregonlive, 3 Oct. 2022
  • The path to full-on enlightenment is, of course, a bit more tortuous.
    — Robert Wright, WIRED, 9 Apr. 2018
  • Time and again, the movie strains for effect, favoring the tortuous over the plain.
    — Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, 31 Mar. 2017
  • The roads are all tortuous and the houses are high up from the street, each with a garden of some sort in its small front yard.
    — Phoebe Wall Howard, Detroit Free Press, 28 May 2018
  • Building a mosque in France is a tortuous endeavor at the best of times.
    — New York Times, 31 Mar. 2021
  • This chart shows the tortuous paths that evolution has taken in these beetles.
    — Carl Zimmer, Discover Magazine, 14 July 2010
  • This all seems inhumane and tortuous after knowing that there’s a better way to work and lead your life.
    — Jack Kelly, Forbes, 2 Sep. 2021
  • The reunion capped a tortuous day for Sanchez, who was accompanied at times by her son.
    — Deon J. Hampton, NBC News, 7 July 2023
  • And like some kind of tortuous finger trap, the more London has fought against it, the tighter and more painful the bind has become.
    — Tom McTague, The Atlantic, 15 Sep. 2020
  • An anecdote from Shostakovich’s last years adds a grace note to the tortuous history of the Fifth.
    — Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 21 Nov. 2024
  • Even in the recent era of plodding and tortuous pace of play, there was zero chance of getting all that research into a game.
    — Bryce Miller, San Diego Union-Tribune, 14 Apr. 2023
  • The new design marks the latest chapter in the project’s tortuous history.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 29 Sep. 2021
  • Then there is the tortuous business of tackling the essay questions themselves.
    — Isabelle Sarraf, WSJ, 2 Aug. 2022
  • At the end, visitors were greeted by unlit caverns, a maze of tortuous passages, and no staff.
    — National Geographic, 9 Nov. 2019
  • The bottom line is that the tortuous student debt complex punishes too many of the people that it is supposed to help.
    — Caitlin Zaloom, Time, 29 Oct. 2019
  • For the first time in Britain's tortuous Brexit saga, the true believers are running the show.
    — Alexander Smith, NBC News, 27 July 2019
  • But having a more functional Muni system is just one step in the long, tortuous process to get people out of their cars.
    — Rachel Swan, San Francisco Chronicle, 21 Apr. 2018
  • An 80-year-old grandmother jets halfway around the world in her tortuous quest to exhume her father's bones from a mass grave.
    — Stephen Dalton, The Hollywood Reporter, 21 Feb. 2018
  • If the Nationals find the right partner and value before then, the process to get there could be nothing short of tortuous.
    — Spencer Nusbaum, New York Times, 25 Mar. 2026
  • Slow-moving cars on the Ike, caught in their own tortuous crawl, still often pass our CTA train.
    — Chicago Tribune, 9 June 2026
  • The tortuous games –the type that combine a lot of nail-biting and lead to higher blood pressure– are the ones the Giants have been winning.
    — Kerry Crowley, The Mercury News, 20 Sep. 2019
  • His long, tortuous recovery won him the Comeback Player of the Year award.
    — Scott D. Pierce, The Salt Lake Tribune, 16 Aug. 2021
  • The development concludes a tortuous bargaining process that lasted longer than the term of the three-year contract.
    — Katie Kilkenny, HollywoodReporter, 3 Sep. 2019
  • At the end of this long, tortuous road stand the smoldering remains of the tower in North Kensington.
    — Ian Volner, The Atlantic, 19 June 2017
  • For one year and three days, marchers followed a tortuous route that wound west before looping north to Yan'an in central Shaanxi province.
    — Jennifer Lin, Philly.com, 22 May 2017
  • Soon afterwards, the trail would begin a tortuous five-mile, 3,000-foot ascent to checkpoint three.
    — Wenxin Fan, WSJ, 3 Oct. 2021
  • Nerdy scholars, tortuous tenure tracks and college campus rivalry abounds.
    — Brianne Kane, Scientific American, 13 Feb. 2026
  • Among the many milestones that marked the tortuous path of Vietnam War, the Tet Offensive stands out.
    — Time, 30 Jan. 2018

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

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