sinuous
adjective
Did you know?
Although it probably makes you think more of snakes than head colds, sinuous is etymologically more like sinus than serpent. Sinuous and sinus both derive from the Latin noun sinus, which means "curve, fold, or hollow." Other sinus descendants include insinuate ("to impart or suggest in an artful or indirect way") and two terms you might remember from math class: sine and cosine. In English, sinus is the oldest of these words; it entered the language in the 1400s. Insinuate appeared next, in the early 1500s, and was followed by sinuous and sine in the latter half of the 1500s, and cosine in the 1600s. Serpent, by the way, entered English in the 13th century and comes from the Latin verb serpere, meaning "to creep."
Examples of sinuous in a Sentence
Sam Cochran, Architectural Digest, 18 Mar. 2025
The blazer was decorated with sculptural gold- and silver-tone embellishments and featured sinuous lapels with sharp angles.
—Julia Teti, WWD, 17 Mar. 2025
In the second, DC power from the first stage is converted to a high-frequency AC square wave (think of a classic sine wave but with a square shape rather than, well, a sinuous one) by a circuit known as an inverter.
—Wally Rippel, IEEE Spectrum, 4 Mar. 2025
Throughout Audition, the sentences are sinuous, paratactic, reflecting the instability of the characters’ natures and the relations between them, allowing different possibilities to be held in tension before receding again.
—Lidija Haas, Harper's Magazine, 3 Mar. 2025
See All Example Sentences for sinuous
Cite this Entry
“Sinuous.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sinuous. Accessed 3 Apr. 2025.
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