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."
Synonyms
Examples of sinuous in a Sentence
Katie Kitamura, Travel + Leisure, 25 Apr. 2024
The heist occurred during a 27-minute window in which one driver slept in the vehicle’s sleeper berth and another ate a meal at the Flying J, a sprawling truck stop just off Interstate 5’s sinuous Grapevine in Lebec, Calif.
That crime remains unsolved.
—Richard Winton, Los Angeles Times, 4 Apr. 2024
See all Example Sentences for sinuous 
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'sinuous.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Dictionary Entries Near sinuous
Cite this Entry
“Sinuous.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sinuous. Accessed 29 May. 2024.
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