Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Difficult to understand; recondite.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Withdrawn from view; out of the way; concealed.
- Remote from comprehension; difficult to be apprehended or understood; profound; occult; esoteric: opposed to obvious.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective obsolete Concealed or hidden out of the way.
- adjective Remote from apprehension; difficult to be comprehended or understood; recondite.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective difficult to penetrate; incomprehensible to one of ordinary understanding or knowledge
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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Very enthusiastic, I remember they said you were, on certain abstruse points in comparative philology.
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Greek, and Hebrew languages, and perfectly well knew not only the sciences called abstruse, but those arts which come under the denomination of polite literature.
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Madam, all minds are not gifted with the necessary qualities which the delicacy of those fine sciences called abstruse require.
The Magnificent Lovers (Les Amants magnifiques) 1622-1673 Moli��re 1647
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I am now approaching the border land of what may be called the abstruse in science, in which I humbly acknowledge it would take a vast volume to contain all I don't know; yet I hope to make plain to you this most beautiful and accurate method, and for fear I may forget to give due credit, I will say that I am indebted to Dr. Hastings for it, with whom it was an original discovery, though he told me he afterward found it had been in use by
Scientific American Supplement, No. 484, April 11, 1885 Various
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I choose to believe instead that Spinrad is engaging in some kind of abstruse wordplay in which “Mike Resnick is an African SF writer” is revealed to be a pun or a palindrome or something, rather than something that he thought would be a useful addition to the discussion.
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Belle does some kind of abstruse Boswellising; after the first meal, having gauged the kind of jests that would pay here, I observed, ‘Boswell is Barred during this cruise.’
Vailima Letters 2005
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Newspapers are busy with extracts; -- much complaining that it is "abstruse," neological, hard to get the meaning of.
The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol. I Thomas Carlyle 1838
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(And as long as you're looking stuff up, please check "abstruse" for me.)
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I would rather phrase abstruse medicaments of rare application; perhaps it is not very necessary, but at least it isn't cheap. "
Là-bas Keene [Translator] Wallace 1877
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Many hedge funds piled up fortunes with abstruse mathematical trading strategies that paid little attention to the individuals or companies underlying their trades.
corylusavellana commented on the word abstruse
"The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry
Came loud--and hark, again ! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings : save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
'Tis calm indeed ! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Frost at Midnight.
December 22, 2008
munjal.upadhyay commented on the word abstruse
abstract
March 24, 2013
mohitanand commented on the word abstruse
adjective: difficult to understand; incomprehensible
Physics textbooks can seem so abstruse to the uninitiated that readers feel as though they are looking at hieroglyphics.
October 20, 2016