Word of the Day

: June 1, 2021

anfractuous

adjective an-FRAK-chuh-wus

What It Means

: full of windings and intricate turnings : tortuous

anfractuous in Context

"Then, as the road resumed its anfractuous course, clinging to the extreme margin of this tumbled and chaotic coast, the fun began. It was impossible to count the roller-coaster climbs and downward swoops; ravines skirted; rivers ingeniously bridged; bends tight as the loops in a thumbprint; naked rockfaces; cliff-edge encounters, hundreds of feet above the ocean, each of which induced a sickly pang of vertigo." — Jonathan Raban, The New York Times, 10 June 2011

"Readers who require a single conflict or steady linear progression may find Lurkers' anfractuous structure unwieldy, but there's something cinematic about how Lurkers works. The novel recalls the winding yet interconnected narratives of Robert Altman films like Nashville (1975) and Short Cuts (1993)." — John A. Riley, PopMatters, 1 Mar. 2021

Did You Know?

Plots and paths can be anfractuous. They twist and turn but do not break. Never mind that the English word comes ultimately from the Latin verb frangere, meaning "to break." (Frangere is also the source of fracture, fraction, fragment, and frail.) But one of the steps between frangere and anfractuous is Latin anfractus, meaning "coil, bend." The prefix an- here means "around." At first, anfractuous was all about ears and the auditory canal's anfractuosity, that is, its being curved rather than straight. Anfractuous has been around for centuries, without a break, giving it plenty of time to wind its way into other applications; e.g., there can be an anfractuous thought process or an anfractuous shoreline.