How to Use abstruse in a Sentence

abstruse

adjective
Definition of abstrusenext
Synonyms for abstrusenext
  • Her subject matter is abstruse.
  • But she is known for her more abstruse constructions, and those will be showcased at the Met.
    — Vanessa Friedman, New York Times, 21 Oct. 2016
  • If the bank’s lawyers are right, the plot was extraordinarily abstruse.
    — Dexter Filkins, The New Yorker, 7 Oct. 2020
  • The film that results is at once panicky and abstruse, and we are left with little more than the delirious shine of McConaughey’s eyes and the preacherly rapture in his voice.
    — Adam Davidson, The New Yorker, 6 Feb. 2017
  • The connection was abstruse but strong, similar in kind to the orchestra's pairing of Bruckner and John Adams in 2011.
    — Zachary Lewis, cleveland.com, 30 Apr. 2018
  • Her voice was as engaging and charming as her ex-husband’s was abstruse and highfalutin.
    — Penelope Green, New York Times, 7 Dec. 2023
  • Here, her motives are more abstruse, to slightly dimmed dramatic effect.
    — Guy Lodge, Variety, 3 Feb. 2024
  • First published in 1619, Kepler’s treatise was both an abstruse work of mathematics and a vision of the universe as a kind of celestial music box.
    — Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker, 27 Mar. 2023
  • Many of the fiercest issues of contention in contemporary discourse can be put aside if these abstruse philosophical claims are correct.
    — Oliver Traldi, Washington Examiner, 1 June 2023
  • What looks like abstruse economic theory will rapidly turn into hard financial fact if Italy’s elections go the wrong way and its bond market sours.
    — James MacKintosh, WSJ, 4 Sep. 2017
  • Such work might seem abstruse to outsiders, but uses abound, from cosmology to cryptography.
    — The Economist, 20 July 2017
  • Also, faith that all the abstruse wanderings will eventually get someplace.
    — Neil Genzlinger, New York Times, 12 Oct. 2016
  • Still, Vigna and Casey commendably explain an abstruse concept from first principles.
    — Stephen Phillips, San Francisco Chronicle, 1 June 2018
  • Forget the expertise and abstruse calculations for a moment.
    — Erik Sherman, Fortune, 20 Mar. 2020
  • During the discussion on Twitter, which lasted almost an hour, Musk answered abstruse technical questions and provided a detailed timeline of what went wrong during the four-minute flight.
    — Kenneth Chang, BostonGlobe.com, 30 Apr. 2023
  • During the discussion on Twitter, which lasted almost an hour, Mr. Musk answered abstruse technical questions and provided a detailed timeline of what went wrong during the four-minute flight.
    — Kenneth Chang, New York Times, 29 Apr. 2023
  • The procedures are so abstruse that a parliamentarian must sit below the presiding officer and, essentially, tell him or her what to say.
    — Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, 11 Aug. 2021
  • No subject is too abstruse for his fiendishly playful comic imagination.
    — Ashley Lee, Los Angeles Times, 11 June 2023
  • Unlike crossword puzzles, which require a tolerance for deciphering abstruse clues, sudoku merely asks players to count to 9 over and over again without repeating the same numeral in the same row or column.
    — Daniel Feit, WIRED, 1 Aug. 2012
  • Like bird-watching or gardening, overseeing homework is a specialized and abstruse hobby.
    — Saul Austerlitz, New York Times, 5 Sep. 2023
  • This is not a problem for the experts to handle by making abstruse technocratic adjustments to complicated payment schedules.
    — Jay Cost, National Review, 12 Feb. 2018
  • Coon became the world’s leading expert on this crucially important, completely abstruse labor...
    — Ben Cohen, WSJ, 29 June 2017
  • On her site, Lab Muffin (labmuffin.com), the chemist demystifies scientific lingo and product labels to help inform laypeople and promote critical thinking about abstruse beauty claims.
    — Hana Hong, Marie Claire, 3 Sep. 2019
  • Using high-powered computers to construct abstruse models, quantitative traders instantaneously analyze an amount of data that is too vast for any one human mind.
    — WSJ, 21 May 2017
  • There’s no guarantee of success — no assurance that quantum mechanics really does have something plain and simple at its heart, rather than the abstruse collection of mathematical concepts used today.
    — Quanta Magazine, 30 Aug. 2017
  • More than many other abstruse areas of higher mathematics, chaos theory has captured the public imagination.
    — Martin Weil, BostonGlobe.com, 14 July 2019
  • Hour-long conversations would oscillate between abstruse metaphors representing indebtedness and poverty, and an equally opaque jargon composed of math and finance-speak.
    — Elena Botella, The New Republic, 2 Oct. 2019
  • But the long, artsy movement and dance interludes don't educate as well here—cursory overviews of realities like ESL classes and resettlement financing give way to abstruse and scattershot fragments.
    — Chicago Reader, 25 Oct. 2017
  • This abstruse category of occupations includes architects, lawyers, artists, educators, doctors, and engineers, just to name a few.
    — NBC News, 11 Mar. 2020
  • And someone really curious might consider the work’s Latin title and ponder its real, if abstruse, physical and philosophical properties.
    — David Mermelstein, WSJ, 2 Sep. 2017

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'abstruse.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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