thorny
/ˈθɔːni
/adjective (thornier, thorniest)
1Having many thorns or thorn bushes: tangled thorny branches...
- The white blossom stands out against the black thorny branches.
- The thorny branches quickly entangled him, biting deeply into his skin.
- The bark was extremely coarse and the branches were thorny and brittle.
Synonyms
prickly, spiky, barbed, spiny, spined, bristly, briary, sharp, pointed
technical spinose, spinous
2Causing distress, difficulty, or trouble: a thorny problem for our team to solve...
- As time moved on, and in the process of looking for answers to difficult questions, the thorny issue of forgiveness cropped up.
- Remove context and you remove the possibility of people thinking about awkward issues or raising thorny questions.
- Difficult and thorny issues are resolved by intelligent listening.
Synonyms
problematic, tricky, ticklish, delicate, controversial, awkward, prickly;
difficult, knotty, tough, taxing, trying, troublesome, irksome, vexatious, bothersome, worrying, concerning, upsetting;
complicated, complex, involved, convoluted, intricate, vexed
informal sticky
British informal dodgy
Derivatives
thornily
- In the mountains of San Gabriel, overlooking the lowland vines and fruit groves, Mother Nature is most ruggedly, thornily savage.
thorniness
- It often forms dense thickets, and these are often thorny, since thornless cultivars appear to retain genes for thorniness that may be expressed as genes recombine in their progeny.
- Again, as with much of Mahler, it's not so much a matter of the thorniness of the musical material or the opacity of the form, but the emotional content of the piece.
- Avid moviegoers should be singing the director's praises from the rooftops for daring to thrash out the matter in all its imperfect, dark thorniness.