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say it: NAH-tee
knotty is an adjective meaning "making great mental demands; hard to comprehend or solve or believe". It carries 4 recorded senses.
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”
used of old persons or old trees; covered with knobs or knots
“gnarled and knotted hands”
“a knobbed stick”
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”
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 knotty 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.