knotty — OET · Shobdo

knotty

adjective

1 a knotty legal problem:

complex, complicated, involved, intricate, convoluted, Byzantine, tangled, tortuous;

difficult, hard, thorny, taxing, awkward, tricky, problematic, troublesome, perplexing, baffling, mystifying, obscure, unfathomable, unanswerable, insoluble, impenetrable;

formal involute, involuted.

▷antonyms straightforward, simple.

2 knotty roots of gorse bushes:

gnarled, knotted, knurled, nodular, knobbly, lumpy, bumpy, rugged, rough, coarse;

rare nodulous, nodose.

3 a knotty piece of thread:

knotted, tangled, tangly, twisted, entangled, ravelled, snarled, matted.

knotty Oxford Dictionary of English