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Complicated   /kˈɑmpləkˌeɪtəd/   Listen
Complicated

adjective
1.
Difficult to analyze or understand.  "Complicated Middle East politics"



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"Complicated" Quotes from Famous Books



... pleasant morning in August, I called for my "rechnung" at the German gasthaus on the Wasseli-Ostrow. The bill was complicated in proportion to its length. There was an extra charge of fifteen kopeks a day for the room over and above the amount originally specified. That was conscientious cheating, so I made no complaint. Then there was a charge for ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne

... form a large collection, and strangers, perhaps, are occasionally admitted for reading or reference, the library necessarily assumes more extensive proportions, and its arrangements become more complicated. For example, heating apparatus becomes very possibly indispensable; the question comes up of ceiling lights; the apartments are probably carried up to the height of two storeys, and galleries formed around. Seclusion becomes ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys

... admit, the obligation of the treaty. It is not necessary, nor would time permit me, to enter into the complicated question of the nature of the obligations of that treaty; but I am not able to subscribe to the doctrine of those who have held in this House what plainly amounts to an assertion, that the simple fact of the existence of a guarantee is binding on every party to it, irrespectively altogether of ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various

... The question was complicated by the presence in Russia of a large army of Czecho-Slovaks (check'o-slovaks'). These soldiers were natives of the northwestern Slavic provinces of Austria-Hungary. They had been part of the Austrian army during the victorious Russian campaigns in Galicia and had been ...
— A School History of the Great War • Albert E. McKinley, Charles A. Coulomb, and Armand J. Gerson

... approached. In the meantime the Estates had assembled another army, which was joined by one composed of 12,000 Germans under Duke Casimir. Both armies were rendered inactive by want of funds, and the situation was complicated by the entry of the Duke of Alencon, the brother of the King of France, into the Netherlands. Don John, the hero of the battle of Lepanto, who had shown himself on many battlefields to be at once a great commander and a valiant soldier, was prostrate by disease, brought ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty

... happiness for several hours, passing five or six times from one to the other before I was exhausted. In the intervals, seeing them to be docile and desirous, I made them execute Aretin's most complicated postures, which amused them beyond words. We kissed whatever took our fancy, and just as Hedvig applied her lips to the mouth of the pistol, it went off and the discharge inundated her face and her bosom. She was delighted, and watched the process to the end with all ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... is the language, and it is especially noticeable in Kamchatka, Siberia, or any part of the great Russian Empire. What the ancestors of the Russians did at the Tower of Babel to have been afflicted with such a complicated, contorted, mixed up, utterly incomprehensible language, I can hardly conjecture. I have thought sometimes that they must have built their side of the Tower higher than any of the other tribes, and have been punished for their sinful industry with this jargon of unintelligible sounds, ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan

... articulates with the bones of the carpus and forms the wrist-joint. This bone is situated on the outside of the fore-arm, (the side on which the thumb is placed.) The ulna and radius, at their extremities, articulate with each other, by which union the hand is made to rotate, permitting its complicated and varied movements. ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter

... restless, disappointed, imaginative spinster, consumed with the love of Michael-Angelesque attitudes and mystical robes; but I am pretty sure she had not in her nature those depths of unutterable thought which, when you first knew her, seemed to look out from her eyes and to prompt her complicated gestures. Those features, in especial, had a misleading eloquence; they rested upon you with a far-off dimness, an air of obstructed sympathy, which was certainly not always a key to the spirit of their owner; and I suspect that a young lady could not really have been so dejected and disillusioned ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James

... in this complicated machine is composed of the twenty-three Congregations, a kind of executive and deliberative committees, consisting of cardinals and prelates, and first used by Sixtus V., as a speedier and more effective method of eliciting the opinions of his counsellors ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... vi. 10; Matth. xv. 14; John ix. 39; Ephes. i. 18; 2 Pet. i. 9. Spiritual blindness and deafness are specially seen in the relation of the people to the leadings of the Church, and to the promises of Scripture. The blind cannot understand the complicated ways of God; the deaf have, especially in the time of misery, no ear for His promises. Besides the natural and spiritual blindness, Scripture knows of still a third; it designates as blind those who ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg

... encroachments which the Liberal party aimed at,—ever an autocrat rather than minister, having no faith in governmental responsibility to parliament. Only one master he served, and that was the king, as Richelieu served Louis XIII. Nor would he hear of a divided ministry; affairs were too complicated to permit him to be encumbered by colleagues. He maintained that public affairs demanded quickness, energy, and unity of action; and it was certainly fortunate for Germany in the present crisis that the foreign policy was in the hands of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord

... which from her point of view were quite good enough for the Provinces, namely the restitution of their old Constitutional Government without religious liberty; although in their own view, religious liberty was primarily essential. Leicester complicated matters for her by accepting, in flat contradiction to her orders, the formal Governorship of the United Provinces: finding in fact that if he was to stay in the Netherlands nothing short of that would prevail against the suspicions of the Queen's treachery. At ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes

... are wonderful in their ability to comprehend machinery, and in dexterity in the use of tools, the special sense represented by the organ of Constructiveness. They seem to be perfectly at home with a piece of new and complicated machinery in five minutes, while others will work on the same thing for hours, growing more and more bewildered, and exhibiting little or no mechanical genius whatever, literally making a botch of everything they ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor

... varied, ad libitum; and the more they are diversified, the greater advantage the lady will derive from them, provided she persevere until she can perform one figure with accuracy, before she enter upon another that is more complicated. Should the horse, in changing, yield his head, but withhold his croup so as to destroy the union of his action, or mar the perfection of the change, the rider should bring it to the proper position, or sequence, by an aid of the whip or leg, as ...
— The Young Lady's Equestrian Manual • Anonymous

... of his engagement," said Arnold Wayne, looking at Elsie. "What a complicated business this is! It seems that we each have an interest in this young gentleman," he added, with a ...
— A Vanished Hand • Sarah Doudney

... to make me afraid of him]: The decree was gone out—Betty must smart—smart too by an act of her own choice. He loved, he said, to make bad people their own punishers.—Nay, Madam, excuse me; but if the fellow, if this Joseph, in your opinion, deserves punishment, mine is a complicated; a man and his wife cannot well suffer separately, and it may come home ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson

... 'The affair became complicated,' went on Mr Cupples unmoved, 'because after Marlowe's suspicions were awakened, a second subtle mind came in to interfere with the plans of the first. That sort of duel often happens in business and politics, but less frequently, I imagine, in ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley

... dramatic, according as either element contributes most largely to its purpose. Simple melody or harmony appeals mostly to the sensuous love of sweet sounds. The symphony does this in an enlarged and complicated sense, but is still more marked by the marvelous suggestive energy with which it unlocks all the secret raptures of fancy, floods the border-lands of thought with a glory not to be found on sea or land, and paints ravishing pictures, that ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris

... Tamales, perhaps the most famous culinary product of the Southwest, were probably of Indian origin. Their construction is too complicated to explain here, further than to say that they are made of corn-meal and chopped meat rolled ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez

... my mind was not confused enough before, I complicated its confusion fifty thousand-fold, by having states and seasons when I was clear that Biddy was immeasurably better than Estella, and that the plain honest working life to which I was born had nothing in it to be ashamed ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens

... any means. But it's getting itself complicated, Mr. Green. I mean to see the end of it, and if I'm beat,—why I can take a beating as well ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope

... lightning-flashes, from which side the future will shine; and I walk towards it, and live thus, climbing up in a steep dark forest towards a point where a light is divined, a light that cannot deceive me, but which the obtruding branches of a complicated and apparent life hide from me. That which will bring me nearer it is not arguing about the probable nature of the light, but walking; I mean, fortifying in myself and others a will ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various

... question of the age, embracing within its limits all others. Education is of far more importance than the suffrage, which is eventually subject to it, controlled by it. This is, indeed, a question altogether too grave, too comprehensive, and too complicated in some of its bearings to be more than briefly alluded to here. But let us consider education for a moment as the mere acquirement of intellectual knowledge. This is but one of its phases, and that ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper

... she plan a complicated slaughter, paying heed to every detail: the sharpening of the knives, the having ready of mops and pails of water for purposes of after cleaning up. As a writer she would have followed the ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome

... the best will in the world, but something had gone wrong with his gun; it was a complicated machine, and he had evidently jammed some part of it. I saw him working frenziedly with a large iron spanner in his hand; but nothing he could do produced the least effect. It would ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham

... Verse betwixt Mirtilla and Prince Frederick' which he thinks demanded 'another more easy Dress,' but, in truth, it can only be attributed to the most verjuiced spite and personal malice. The plot, though somewhat complicated with perhaps a press of crowding incidents, is none the less highly interesting, and the characters are most of them excellently, all well, drawn and sustained. The fact that certain episodes had to be cut in representation in order to bring the comedy within ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn

... swells with the purest of all pride, when the thinker says to himself: I am the King—because the hero or highest type of the Articulata, Radiata, Mammalia, or any order of vegetable or animal life. All these great and complicated developments are the beautiful works of the Great Unseen, but I am His masterpiece. One may well dream in this zoological museum, amid the staring glass-eyed skins of an inferior brotherhood—of the long, long time ago when the fossils, which are now scattered here ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold

... the guillotine. In this agonizing condition, she maintained the most wonderful fortitude and patience; without uncommon firmness and sincere trust in providence, she must have sunk under such deep and complicated distress. While she was in prison, she was often found in a retired spot, engaged in holy and humble supplication to heaven. When she was released from the prison, after about twenty months of degrading confinement, her constitution was greatly ...
— Memoirs of General Lafayette • Lafayette

... the common worker is incomparably less free than the common worker in Japan. He is less free because of the more complicated mechanism of Occidental societies, whose forces tend to agglomeration and solid integration. He is less free because the social and industrial machinery on which he must depend reshapes him to its own ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn

... one form of work above another, is that some kinds of work are so very hard to do. They involve the intense and complicated action of many and of complex powers. It may be hard physical work to break stones for a road-way, but the task itself is a simple one—the lifting of the arm and dropping it again with sufficient force to split a rock apart. But the ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown

... subject of much anxiety; and while Mrs. Nesbit treated it as an absurd trifling with his own health, and his father reproached himself for being obliged to leave Arthur to him, Theodora suffered from complicated jealousy. Arthur seemed to want John more than her, John risked himself in London, in order to be with Arthur ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge

... own pillars. Of course, I did not discover all this from the river, and in the moonlight. But, though I was there for many days, I did not succeed in mastering the inner topography of the building, so extensive and complicated was it. ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald

... repeating rifles, some of the first that were ever made, serviceable but rather complicated weapons that fired five cartridges. Hans, however, with my permission, armed himself with the little Purdey piece that was named "Intombi," the singe-barrelled, muzzle-loading gun which had done me so much service in earlier days, and even on my last journey to Pongoland. He said that he was ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard

... so much that there was not sufficient water to float the boat over the intervening sand-banks, and at low water Mr. Wilson waded across the deeper channels and walked over the dry banks to the vessel. As the affair appeared to be complicated with some private misunderstanding between the parties, and Mr. Wilson had neglected to make proper arrangements with the master of the vessel, I deemed it desirable that the investigation should ...
— Journals of Australian Explorations • A C and F T Gregory

... anxiety the watchers noted the steady downward progress of the Mercury's spars and cordage past the now struggling form of the woman, victims of alternate dismay and hope as they saw the body now fouled by some portion of the complicated net-work of standing and running gear between the main and mizzen masts, and anon drifting clear of it again. A few seconds, which to the quartette in the pilot- house seemed spun out to the duration of ages, and the last ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... the first monarch of his line to make use of the Persian cuneiform script, which in this case he utilized in conjunction with the older and more complicated Assyro-Babylonian alphabetic and syllabic characters to record a portion of the history of his reign. Rawlinson's translation of the famous inscription was an important contribution towards the decipherment of the cuneiform writings ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie

... are rigidly severe, found by experience that he succeeded best in his examination by allowing one day of entire rest just before it. His brain and nervous system refreshed in this way carried him through the work better than if taxed to the last moment. There are men transacting a large and complicated business who can testify to the same influence from the ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... probably far excelled him in sympathy with nature, power of observation, and all the gifts especially required for a landscape-painter. What you really needed, study under a figure-painter, or better still at an Academy, would have given you. Landscape nature is too complicated to be a good school to acquire the mastery over the mechanical difficulties in art. I don't agree with you that you ought to have filled your notebooks with memoranda from nature instead of painting pictures at Loch Awe. Your experience there was very valuable. A notebook memorandum ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al

... appeared at occasional intervals, they had little or no difficulty in fulfilling their duty. But when the Cathari and the Patazins had sprung up everywhere, especially in southern Italy and France and northern Spain, the secrecy of their movements made the task of the bishop extremely hard and complicated. Rome soon perceived that they were not very zealous in prosecuting heresy. To put an end to this neglect, Lucius III, jointly with the Emperor Frederic Barbarossa and the bishops of his court, enacted a decretal at Verona in 1184, regulating the ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard

... reader admires the lofty tone of poetry and high strain of morality which pervades "OEdipus Coloneus," it must appear more natural to his feelings, that the life of the hero, stained with unintentional incest and parricide, should be terminated, as in Dryden's play, upon the discovery of his complicated guilt and wretchedness. Yet there is something awful in the idea of the monarch, blind and exiled, innocent in intention, though so horribly criminal in fact, devoted, as it were, to the infernal deities, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden

... broken, and a destructive contest divided its harmonious forces directly; on the one hand, an enlarged experience and a more distinct thinking necessitated a sharper separation of the sciences, while, on the other hand, the more complicated machinery of states necessitated a stricter sundering of ranks and occupations. Intuitive and speculative understanding took up a hostile attitude in opposite fields, whose borders were guarded with jealousy and distrust; and by limiting its operation ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... counsel and, therefore, as an administrator in the retaining of distinguished counsels, I met with many of the best men at the bar, but never any with such a complete and clarified intellect as William M. Evarts. The mysteries of the most complicated cases seemed simple, the legal difficulties plain, and the solution comprehensible to ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew

... corollary to his instant necessity of straightening out the reformatory situation. This latter necessity had dominated his thought ever since the chance meeting in the post-office. And as his mind explored the subject, it ramified, and grew more complicated and oppressive with every step ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... The Gold Board met only to adjourn, as the Clearing-House had been incapable of the task of settling its accounts, complicated as they were by ever fresh failures. The small brokers had gone under by scores. The rumors of the impending suspension of some of the largest houses of the street gave fresh grounds for fear. The Stock Exchange was now the centre of attraction. ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... that of the mechanical escapement, has presented one of the most tantalizing of problems. Without doubt, the crown and foliot type of escapement appears to be the first complicated mechanical invention known to the European Middle Ages; it heralds our whole age of machine-making. Yet no trace has been found either of a steady evolution of such escapements or of their invention in Europe, ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price

... it is conceivable that the rebels might have held Johannesburg until the universal sympathy which their cause excited throughout South Africa would have caused Great Britain to intervene. Unfortunately they had complicated matters by asking for outside help. Mr. Cecil Rhodes was Premier of the Cape, a man of immense energy, and one who had rendered great services to the empire. The motives of his action are obscure—certainly, we may say that ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle

... and more than agree with you: it is the only new tragedy that I ever saw and really liked. The plot is most interesting, and, though so complicated quite clear and natural. The circumstance of so much distress being brought on by characters, every one good, yet acting consistently with their principles towards the misfortunes of the drama, is quite new and pleasing. Nothing offended me but that lisping Miss Haughton, whose every ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole

... last days of August 1862, which include the second battle of Bull Run (second Manassas), are amongst the most complicated of the war. At the outset the Confederate general Lee's army (Longstreet's and Jackson's corps) lay on the Rappahannock, faced by the Federal Army of Virginia under Major-General John Pope, which was to be reinforced by ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... which he had sworn to defend. Hence the opposition he manifested to the measures of the 18th Brumaire. But he cherished no personal animosity against Bonaparte as long as he was ignorant of his ambitious designs. The extraordinary and complicated nature of subsequent events rendered his possession of the crown of Sweden in no way incompatible with his fidelity to the Constitution ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... once, from the gallery above, I had seen the tubes and retorts, the jars of unfamiliar organisms, the books of unfamiliar lore, the impedimenta of the occult student and man of science—the visible evidences of Fu-Manchu's presence. Shelves—cases—niches—were bare. Of the complicated appliances unknown to civilized laboratories, wherewith he pursued his strange experiments, of the tubes wherein he isolated the bacilli of unclassified diseases, of the yellow-bound volumes for a glimpse at which (had they known of their contents) the great men of Harley Street would ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer

... leveled, and the first shell thrown at the American Continent, driving a slaveholding faction into despair, and a political confusion from which they have been utterly unable to extricate themselves, but become more and more complicated every year, Africa was held in reserve, until by the help of an All-wise Providence we could effect what has just been accomplished with signal success—a work which the most sanguine friend of the cause believed would require at least the ...
— Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party • Martin Robinson Delany

... military officer is called upon to perform is not criminal, and he may with a good conscience carry out the commands of his government, whatever may be his private opinion of the justice of the war. All such cases no doubt are more or less complicated, and must be decided each on its own merits. The general principle, however, appears plain, that it is only when the act required of an executive officer involves personal criminality, that he is called upon to resign. This is a case that often occurs. In Romish countries, as Malta, ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... the phrases from their (so-called) natural order is luminous for the mind; and it is by the means of such designed reversal that the elements of a judgment may be most pertinently marshalled, or the stages of a complicated action most ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson

... friendship and regard which has so long existed still continues to prevail, and if possible to increase. Indeed, our relations with that Empire are all that we could desire. Our relations with Spain are now of a more complicated, though less dangerous, character than they have been for many years. Our citizens have long held and continue to hold numerous claims against the Spanish Government. These had been ably urged for a series of years by our successive diplomatic ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Buchanan • James Buchanan

... all the knowledge of the preceding, and adds to it its own discoveries in a progression to which there seems no limit. The skill requisite to direct these immense machines is proportionate to their magnitude and complicated mechanism; and, therefore, the English sailor, considered merely as a sailor, is vastly ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock

... through his calculations again. A long course of work night and day was rewarded by finding that he was now able to hit off the motions better than before; but what a singularly complicated motion it was. Could it be expressed no more simply? Yes, the curve so described by the planet is a comparatively simple one: it is a special kind of oval—the ellipse. Strange that he had not thought of it before. It was a famous curve, for ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge

... are worth a gross of Landon Snowes. He loves you, of course—he'd have been an icicle to have failed in so obvious a duty; but it's only a matter of pure admiration, scarcely of any complicated feelings. Besides, dear, these whitewashed, sinewless, variable fellows fade like the winter sun, without any twilight; their features go wandering off in search of becoming expressions, and they would want ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... every sense, without having any idea how each word has meaning or what its meaning is—just as people speak without knowing how the individual sounds are produced. Everyday language is a part of the human organism and is no less complicated than it. It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought. So much so, that from the outward form of the clothing it is impossible to infer the form of ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein

... there is, comes from some inward cause—a complicated one, I judge. I can guess, and that's all. Are there ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner

... M. Brongniart as soon as I have the time to prepare it. On the erratic phenomena, also, I have made numerous observations, which I am anxious to send to M. de Beaumont. These phenomena, so difficult of explanation with us, become still more complicated here, both on account of their contact with the sea and of the vast stretches of flat country over which ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz

... To have been loved by the most brilliant woman of her day, and to have been incapable of loving her, seemed to him, in looking back, the most derisive evidence of his limitations; and his remorseful tenderness for her memory was complicated with a sense of irritation against her for having given him once for all the measure of his emotional capacity. It was not often, however, that he thus probed the past. The public, in taking possession of Mrs. Aubyn, had eased his shoulders of ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton

... membrane separating the lung and intestinal cavity) forward against the lungs, so as to squeeze and stop their movements, thus preventing the animal from breathing and in some instances the case may be complicated by a rupture ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek

... how the simplest matters can be complicated by a free use of scholastic terms, Iquote the following sentence, which is meant as ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller

... destined to become complicated, and an error committed by General Meade came very near exposing him to serious danger. It appears that, after retreating across the Rappahannock, the Federal commander began to entertain doubt whether the movement had not been hasty, and would not justly subject ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke

... wherefores of this escapement, and we will at once begin with the number of teeth in the escape wheel. It is not obligatory in the lever, as in the verge, to have an uneven number of teeth in the wheel. While nearly all have 15 teeth, we might make them of 14 or 16; occasionally we find some in complicated watches of 12 teeth, and in old English watches, of 30, which is a clumsy arrangement, and if the pallets embrace only three teeth in the latter, the pallet center cannot be pitched on ...
— An Analysis of the Lever Escapement • H. R. Playtner

... in the days of this famous struggle that Sir Charles Tregellis was performing his very complicated toilet, and Ambrose, his valet, was helping him to attain that pitch of perfection which had long gained him the reputation of being the best-dressed man in town. Suddenly Sir Charles paused, his coup d'archet half-executed, the final beauty of his neck-cloth ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle

... syllable and of the word, which have been already discussed, there remains the accent of the sentence. Here the problem is much more complicated. The accent of a word, whether pitch or stress, may be considerably modified in the sentence. From earliest times some words have become parasitic or enclitic upon other words. Pronouns more than most words are modified from this cause, but conjunctions like the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... furniture at his dwelling, but found it had all been made over to his son—a young lawyer in the city; meanwhile the dishonest man had fled with his ill-gotten gains, leaving the business in a frightfully complicated state. The result was, as is often the case when a man begins to go down in his affairs, although he may be ever so deserving and innocent, there are enough to give him a push. It was so with him. In vain did Joseph, ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson

... that success it certainly deserved. It was indeed, to quote the preface, 'hugely injured in the acting.' The performers were anything but word perfect and hopelessly forgot or confused their business, which, more especially in a play of such a type as this romantic comedy so full of busy and complicated detail demanding close and continuous attention, was enough to mystify the audience completely and foredoom the piece to failure. The worst sinner was Haunce himself, who hardly spoke one of his lines but gagged from start to finish. Not unnaturally, Mrs. Behn resented ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn

... stuck to their work and, as their hearts were in it, it was surprising how quickly they picked up the rudiments of drill. Fortunately, they were not required to learn anything beyond the management of their firearms, the simplest movements, and the duty of skirmishers; as all complicated maneuvers would have been useless, in a small corps whose duties would be confined ...
— The Young Franc Tireurs - And Their Adventures in the Franco-Prussian War • G. A. Henty

... Fulkerson. "But not always about the same member of it. He gets monotonous, when he doesn't get complicated. I've just come round from the Marches'," he ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... that the more complicated in construction any machine is, the more time and study are needed to understand it fully; and that the more complicated its method of operation is, the more practice is needed in order to ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske

... planets; the planets with all their satellites; the comets wheeling in every direction in their eccentric orbits; and the system of the fixed stars stretching to the remotest limits of space. All the varied and complicated movements of the heavens, in short, must have been at once presented to his mind as the necessary result of that law which he had established in reference to the earth and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... to teach, not how dishonesty is always plunging men into infinitely more complicated external difficulties than it would in real life, but how any continued insincerity gradually darkens and corrupts the very life-springs of the mind: not how all events conspire to crush an unreal being who is to be the "example" of the story, but how ...
— Publisher's Advertising (1872) • Anonymous

... by an aged gentlemen, whose disease a distinguished surgeon had pronounced double hernia. On examining the enlargement, we found the disease to be dropsy of the scrotum, complicated with varicocele. ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... are you. You had to do as you did about the story. If any one is to blame, it is Mr. Marrineal. Yet how can one blame him? He had to protect his mother. It's a fearfully complicated phenomenon, a newspaper, ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... opposite lines. No nuances or subtle shades of feeling complicated life for him. He knew exactly what he wanted and went straight for it, all out, and Ann was conscious that she was fighting a losing battle in her effort to keep him at a distance. He had never, so far, made deliberate love to her, but there was a certain imperious ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler

... friends," then, that I am going to tell a story of harrowing villainy and complicated—but, as I trust, intensely interesting—crime. My rascals are no milk-and-water rascals, I promise you. When we come to the proper places we won't spare fine language—No, no! But when we are going over the quiet country ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray

... a complicated diagram on the sheet of blotting-paper before answering. "I do know a man who, given certain circumstances, has the ability to develop into such a character," he said eventually ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull

... nervous energy, in a nature whose opportunities did not offer full scope to its powers. He had grasped the general conditions, but he had not perceived the particular fact that added tenfold to the evil which exists in the more usual, and less complicated case. ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird

... he had not said, and I could not judge; but here was a light opulence of airy fancy, picturesque conception, vigorous delineation, all marching on as with cheerful drum and fife, if without more rich and complicated forms of melody: if a man would write in metre, this sure enough was the way to try doing it." For such encouragement from that stinted quarter, Sterling, I doubt not, was very thankful; and of course it might co-operate with the inspirations from his Naples Tour to ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle

... The complicated explanations were all over at last, and the curious, fragmentary story was pieced together. Detective Barnes took up the little bronze box and examined it carefully, experimenting, as they all had done, to find a way of ...
— The Dragon's Secret • Augusta Huiell Seaman

... acomplicated combination of devices, characteristic of the debased period which produced it. It is represented in ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell

... said and done, the latter, like Jones in Petacha Valley, got no more than wages out of their whack. In truth, they were hired men for the large business men. Still again, higher up, were the big fellows. They used vast and complicated paraphernalia for the purpose, on a large scale of getting between hundreds of thousands of workers and their products. These men were not so much mere robbers as gamblers. And, not content with their direct winnings, being essentially ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London

... any reader could grasp in a moment, because experience has shown that an equivalent of four chapters of study and practice is required to teach the student the application of this principle and to fix it in his mind so thoroughly that he will not forget it in his later work of writing more complicated stories. It is felt that the beginner needs and must have the detailed explanation, the constant reiteration and some definite rules to guide him in his practice. Hence the emphasis upon the conventional form. Since, in the application of the newspaper principle ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde

... he never so nimble and never so exact, what with the multiplicity of the leaves and the progression of the shadow as it flees before the travelling sun, long ere he has made the circuit the whole figure will have changed. Life may be compared, not to a single tree, but to a great and complicated forest; circumstance is more swiftly changing than a shadow, language much more inexact than the tools of a surveyor; from day to day the trees fall and are renewed; the very essences are fleeting as we look; and the whole world of leaves is swinging ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson

... of hard breathing and of feet scraping violently upon bare boards followed upon this deliverance, complicated by the sharp snap of a breaking walking stick, the thump of a falling chair, a bang as of a heavy body encountering firm resistance from some inflexible article of furniture—probably a bookcase—and finally a ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens

... hours with poor Mrs. Marston. To comfort and console were, of course, out of his power. The nature of the bereavement, far more terrible than death—its recent occurrence—the distracting consciousness of all its complicated consequences—rendered this a hopeless task. She bowed herself under the blow with the submission of a broken heart. The hope to which she had clung for years had vanished; the worst that ever her imagination feared had come ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... great deal of Bobby's time and attention. You see, each event was to be anticipated, and then remembered; the score was to be rejoiced over or regretted; and the great question of how to do better was to be considered prayerfully and long. Bobby found it to be a more complicated problem than he would have believed possible. He used to lie awake in bed thinking it over. Regularly before Thursday came around he hit on a complete solution of the difficulty; and as regularly he discovered ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White

... period of Japanese history in which the relations of the Fujiwara family to the Throne are so complicated as greatly to perplex even the most careful reader. But as it is not possible to construct a genealogical table of a really helpful character, the facts will be set down here in their ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... state of affairs is uncomfortable and complicated just now, but our course is straight; we cannot come to any peace unless we have such guarantees by decided limitation of the Fleet, which would secure us against ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria

... that in sepsis the number of eosinophil cells is enormously diminished, so that Zappert, in five cases of this nature, was unable to recognise any eosinophils in the blood. In contrast to this stands a case of myelogenic leukaemia described by Rieder and Mueller, complicated by a severe and lethally ending suppurative process. In consequence of the acute neutrophil leucocytosis brought about by the septic infection, the number of eosinophils sank rapidly from 3.5% to 0.43% (4 hours before death). The absolute number of eosinophil cells ...
— Histology of the Blood - Normal and Pathological • Paul Ehrlich

... would have the necessary papers there, and make them out if satisfied as to the eligibility of the parties for such a contract, he dismissed the aspirant for marital honors. As the judge entered the shaded coolness of his library after a distracting day spent in the discussion of a complicated will-case, the refreshing atmosphere of refinement and quiet and home exercised so powerful an influence over his tired nerves that he straightway forgot all professional and other cares, and stretching himself in his favorite ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various

... he could not explain such a complicated matter in French, and if he did, M. Considine would not understand that language. But with the question raised, the conversation continued about infanticide and depopulation. The chief quoted the death-sentence ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... expecting, apprehending, or assuming anything of the sort; we can only ask ourself wonderingly: "What brought that into my head?" To the third group those dreams belong which are void of both meaning and intelligibility; they are incoherent, complicated, and meaningless. The overwhelming number of our dreams partake of this character, and this has given rise to the contemptuous attitude towards dreams and the medical theory of their limited psychical activity. It is especially in the longer and more complicated dream-plots ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud

... overcome by her benevolence, "you have judged rightly; I have many things to struggle with. I have a sick friend at home, whom misfortune hath nearly bereft of reason, and whose wants are now so complicated and expensive, that never till now did I know the complete desolation of a man without a country or a profession. For myself, Lady Tinemouth, adversity has few pangs; but for my friend, for an old man whose deranged ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter

... his people. The Pope is nominally sovereign, and all regard him as personally a pure and good man; but he exerts no actual power in the State, his time and thoughts being wholly devoted to the various and complicated cares of his vast Spiritual empire. Meantime, the Reaectionist influences so omnipotent with his predecessor, but which were repressed for a time after the present Pontiff's accession, have unchecked sway in the political administration. The way the present rulers of Rome read ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley

... establishments, the knowledge of that art. Whatever argument may be drawn from particular examples superficially viewed, a thorough examination of the subject will evince that the art of war is at once comprehensive and complicated, that it demands much previous study, and that the possession of it in its most improved and perfect state is always of great moment to the security of a nation. This, therefore, ought to be a serious care of every government, and for this purpose an academy ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 4) of Volume 1: George Washington • James D. Richardson

... hat" gives a certain sameness to the highest points of the beings that are there, but even then the divers ways of wearing it—on the regulation cap like Biquet, over a Balaklava like Cadilhac, or on a cotton cap like Barque—produce a complicated ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse

... came first seemed to be fond of memorizing long and complicated "rules" in grammar and mathematics, but had little thought or knowledge of applying these rules to their everyday affairs of their life. One subject which they liked to talk about, and tell me that they had mastered, in arithmetic, was "banking and discount," ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington

... be coming into them like a fine frost in a winter wind. Then he called to Bryce to let the car descend very slowly. It went down, down, gradually approaching the great shell. When the bottom of the car was within two feet of it, Clewe rang to stop. He looked down at the complicated machine he had worked upon so long, with something like a feeling of affection. This he knew, it was his own. Looking upon its familiar form, he felt that he had a companion in this region ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton

... to my new horizon. It was larger, more complicated, with more masts in the harbor, new streets and horse-car lines, and every one moved about in it like the pieces of a Chinese puzzle. The friends who had lived close about us had all moved westward or southward with the trend of the city, and between Telegraph and Chestnut Street Hills there ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain

... them that the loving-cup is as old as any hunger. It would teach them that ritualism is older than any religion. And a little plain thinking would teach them how harsh and fanciful are the mass of their own ethics, how very civilized and very complicated must be the brain of the Tolstoyan who really believes it to be evil to love one's country and wicked to strike ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... steam. If they attempted violence, he said, there was a force ready to suppress it; but if they were peaceable their wages should be continued until employment was found for them. He could now print 1,100 sheets an hour. By-and-by Koenig's machine proved too complicated, and Messrs. Applegarth and Cowper invented a cylindrical one, that printed 8,000 an hour. Then came Hoe's process, which is now said to print at the rate of from 18,000 to 22,000 copies an hour (Grant). The various improvements ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... as compared with sailboating, we find the situation becoming complicated and growing technical. In sailing, as is generally known, you depend upon the wind; and there are only two things the wind does—one is to blow and the other is not to blow. But when you begin to figure up the things ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb

... prove plainly to them that the moral sense exists, together with moral responsibility. You will find this difficult,—as the virtue implied is intangible, unseeable;—one cannot say of it, lo here!—or lo there!—it is as complicated and subtle as any other of the manifestations of pure Spirit. Then you must decide on one universal standard, or reasonable conception of what 'morality' is. Again, you are met by a crowd of perplexities,—as ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... elicit the consequence 'The founder of the Roman Republic was Brutus,' we certainly have nothing more in the consequent than was already contained in the antecedent; yet all deductive inferences may be reduced to identities as palpable as this, the only difference being that in more complicated cases the consequent is contained in the antecedent along with a number of other things, whereas in this case the consequent is absolutely all that ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock

... it only too well and said so, speaking cheerfully yet seriously of his affairs, which had become so complicated since the closer blockade of the city. But he was ever gaily impatient of details and of pounds and pence. Accounts he utterly refused to audit, leaving it to me to pay his debts, patch up gaps left by depreciated securities, and find a fortune to ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers

... are not tempered by laws quickly become anarchy Associating patience with activity Blindness that make authority to consist only in force Bounty, which, though very often secret, had the louder echo Civil war is one of those complicated diseases Clergy always great examples of slavish servitude Confounded the most weighty with the most trifling Contempt—the most dangerous disease of any State Dangerous to refuse presents from one's superiors Distinguished between bad and worse, good and better Fading flowers, ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Court Memoirs of France • David Widger

... very large increase in the number of water-closets and baths may confidently be anticipated, and it will rarely be advisable to provide for a less quantity of domestic sewage than 15 gallons per head per day for each of the resident inhabitants. The problem is complicated in sea coast towns by the large influx of visitors during certain short periods of the year, for whom the sewerage system must be sufficient, and yet it must not be so large compared with the requirements of the residential population that it cannot be kept in an ...
— The Sewerage of Sea Coast Towns • Henry C. Adams

... philosopher; the adoption of a more scientific doctrine, one that recognises a process of compensation, neutralisation, and accentuation, would probably bring us nearer the truth. But whatever the complicated working of the law of heredity may be, there can be no doubt that the tracing of a remarkable man's pedigree is always an interesting and rarely an entirely idle occupation. Pursuing such an inquiry with regard to Frederick Chopin, we find ourselves, however, soon at the end of our tether. This ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... leader Kumba YALA took office following two rounds of transparent presidential elections. YALA was ousted in a bloodless coup in September 2003, and Henrique ROSA was sworn in as President. Guinea-Bissau's transition back to democracy will be complicated by its crippled economy, devastated in ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... Mazarin to Conde, and she ventured to advise laying hands on the victor of Rocroy and Lens. In 1651—an interval of incertitude for Mazarin, who very nearly ensnared himself in the meshes of his own craftiness and a too-complicated line of conduct—a great interest, the well-founded hope of marrying her daughter Charlotte to the Prince de Conti, brought her back once more to the Conde party, and hence the deliverance of the ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies

... indeed, much more easy to form dialogues than to contrive adventures. Every position makes way for an argument, and every objection dictates an answer. When two disputants are engaged upon a complicated and extensive question, the difficulty is not to continue, but to end the controversy. But whether it be that we comprehend but few of the possibilities of life, or that life itself affords little variety, every ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson

... the oatmeal necessary, she lowered the burners a little and began on the coffee. Then she saw the point of the other stove, for she found she needed it for the bacon and biscuits. The actual work was not so complicated; the thing that appalled her was Pennington's insistence on the awful amount of food needed for the six men and herself. But, of course, as she reminded herself, there was a difference between cooking for Cousin Anna and herself on the maid's day out, or for Lucille and herself, ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer

... his mother had her mind partly on dinner or she might have insisted on knowing what he did over at the Bullfinches'. He sighed. It was all getting too complicated. He certainly would be thankful when the month of the charge ...
— Jerry's Charge Account • Hazel Hutchins Wilson

... of this situation was that it was now becoming complicated on Cowperwood's part with the most disturbing thoughts concerning Berenice Fleming. Ever since the days when he had first met her mother he had been coming more and more to feel for the young girl a soul-stirring passion—and that without a single ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser



Words linked to "Complicated" :   complex, complicatedness



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