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say it: BIZ-uhn-tahyn
byzantine is an adjective and noun meaning "of or relating to the Eastern Orthodox Church or the rites performed in it". It carries 4 recorded senses.
of or relating to the Eastern Orthodox Church or the rites performed in it
“Byzantine monks”
“Byzantine rites”
of or relating to or characteristic of the Byzantine Empire or the ancient city of Byzantium
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”
“tortuous legal procedures”
“tortuous negotiations lasting for months”
a native or inhabitant of Byzantium or of the Byzantine Empire
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for byzantine come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.