How to Use tortuous in a Sentence

tortuous

adjective
  • And even when the rules do apply, the process is tortuous.
    Michael Holtz, The Christian Science Monitor, 12 Apr. 2018
  • 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 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
  • 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
  • Building a mosque in France is a tortuous endeavor at the best of times.
    New York Times, 31 Mar. 2021
  • The path to full-on enlightenment is, of course, a bit more tortuous.
    Robert Wright, WIRED, 9 Apr. 2018
  • For the first time in Britain's tortuous Brexit saga, the true believers are running the show.
    Alexander Smith, NBC News, 27 July 2019
  • Among the many milestones that marked the tortuous path of Vietnam War, the Tet Offensive stands out.
    Time, 30 Jan. 2018
  • 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
  • That’s just a sample during a tortuous one-week stretch.
    Chris Fedor, cleveland, 19 Feb. 2021
  • His long, tortuous recovery won him the Comeback Player of the Year award.
    Scott D. Pierce, The Salt Lake Tribune, 16 Aug. 2021
  • The case took a tortuous route before landing in Ms. Dunikowski’s lap.
    New York Times, 25 Nov. 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • The collapse of the tortuous year-and-a-half partnership, Bratcher notes, came as Sound of Freedom was taking off in theaters.
    Miles Klee, Rolling Stone, 14 Dec. 2023
  • 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
  • Oaks were bizarrely forked and tortuous, ash trees elegant.
    Brian T. Allen, National Review, 19 Mar. 2022
  • As a tortuous 7-2 loss with Los Angeles crawled along, each minute moved them a little closer to the weirdest trade deadline of all time.
    Evan Grant, Dallas News, 31 Aug. 2020
  • It’s a band triumphantly planting its flag on the top of a mountain following a tortuous climb.
    Kelly Dearmore, Dallas News, 21 Aug. 2020
  • The first part of his journey was a 90-minute flight from Melbourne to Sydney, which was incredibly tortuous.
    Tamara Hardingham-Gill, CNN, 13 Apr. 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
  • Apple’s car project has had a long and tortuous history, complicated by the fact that the company rarely comments publicly on the effort.
    Aarian Marshall, WIRED, 3 Feb. 2024
  • The motion detailed a tortuous series of meetings and negotiations that eventually led to that plan being approved by the City Council last month, 447 days late.
    Doug Smith, Los Angeles Times, 9 Feb. 2024

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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