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Latin Ties Things Together With Abstruse
Look closely at the following Latin verbs, all of which are derived from the verb trudere ("to push, thrust"): extrudere, intrudere, obtrudere, protrudere. Remove the last two letters of each of these and you get an English descendant whose meaning involves pushing or thrusting. Another trudere offspring, abstrudere, meaning "to push away" or "to conceal," gave English abstrude, meaning "to thrust away," but that 17th-century borrowing has fallen out of use. An abstrudere descendant that has survived is abstruse, an adjective that recalls the meaning of its Latin parent abstrūsus, meaning "concealed."
Examples of abstruse in a Sentence
Armond White, National Review, 14 Mar. 2025
However, at the OXY ARTS gallery in Los Angeles, that abstruse portrait of Sagittarius A* looks a little different.
—Monisha Ravisetti, Space.com, 4 Jan. 2025
Tunnelling, meanwhile, is an abstruse turn on a classic skill exemplified by the finest Dodger pitcher of them all, Sandy Koufax.
—Nicholas Dawidoff, The New Yorker, 3 Nov. 2024
At the heart of the progress has been von Neumann’s abstruse research.
—Quanta Magazine, 25 Sep. 2024
See All Example Sentences for abstruse
Cite this Entry
“Abstruse.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/abstruse. Accessed 2 May. 2025.
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abstruse
adjective
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