involute - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
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Borrowed from Latin involutus.
involute (comparative more involute, superlative most involute)
- (formal) Difficult to understand; complicated.
1986, John le Carré, A Perfect Spy:
These vulgar, pleasure-seeking people, so frank and clamorous, were too uninhibited for his shielded and involuted life.
- (botany) Having the edges rolled with the adaxial side outward.
1992, Rudolf M[athias] Schuster, The Hepaticae and Anthocerotae of North America: East of the Hundredth Meridian, volume V, Chicago, Ill.: Field Museum of Natural History, →ISBN, page 7:
Furthermore, the free anterior margin of the lobule is arched toward the lobe and is often involute […]
- (biology, of shells) Having a complex pattern of coils in which younger whorls only partly surround older ones.
- (biology) Turned inward at the margin, like the exterior lip of the shells of species in genus Cypraea.
- (biology) Rolled inward spirally.
involute (third-person singular simple present involutes, present participle involuting, simple past and past participle involuted)
involute (plural involutes)
- (geometry) A curve that cuts all tangents of another curve at right angles; traced by a point on a string that unwinds from a curved object.
a curve that cuts all tangents of another curve at right angles; traced by a point on a string that unwinds from a curved object
- “involute”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.
- William Dwight Whitney, Benjamin E[li] Smith, editors (1911), “involute”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., →OCLC.
involute
involūte
- “involute”, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879) A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
- involute in Gaffiot, Félix (1934) Dictionnaire illustré latin-français, Hachette.