ABSTRUSE

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does abstruse mean? 

• ABSTRUSE (adjective)
  The adjective ABSTRUSE has 1 sense:

1. difficult to penetrate; incomprehensible to one of ordinary understanding or knowledge

  Familiarity information: ABSTRUSE used as an adjective is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• ABSTRUSE (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Difficult to penetrate; incomprehensible to one of ordinary understanding or knowledge

Synonyms:

abstruse; deep; recondite

Context example:

some recondite problem in historiography

Similar:

esoteric (confined to and understandable by only an enlightened inner circle)

Derivation:

abstruseness (the quality of being unclear or abstruse and hard to understand)

abstruseness; abstrusity (wisdom that is recondite and abstruse and profound)

 Context examples 

But I had no inclination for the law, even in this less abstruse study of it, which my family approved.

(Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen)

Continuous and profound contemplation or musing on a subject or series of subjects of a deep or abstruse nature; contemplation of spiritual matters

(Meditation Therapy, NCI Thesaurus)

An abstruse and learned specialist who finds that he has been called in for a case of measles would experience something of the annoyance which I read in my friend’s eyes.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

In a thousand ways he smoothed for me the path of knowledge and made the most abstruse inquiries clear and facile to my apprehension.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

From the moment that I conceived the idea of the body being upon the roof, which surely was not a very abstruse one, all the rest was inevitable.

(His Last Bow, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

On the one shelf at the library he found Karl Marx, Ricardo, Adam Smith, and Mill, and the abstruse formulas of the one gave no clew that the ideas of another were obsolete.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

It was boisterous October weather, and we had both remained indoors all day, I because I feared with my shaken health to face the keen autumn wind, while he was deep in some of those abstruse chemical investigations which absorbed him utterly as long as he was engaged upon them.

(The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

In this abstruse pursuit; in making an account for Peggotty, of all the property into which she had come; in arranging all the affairs in an orderly manner; and in being her referee and adviser on every point, to our joint delight; I passed the week before the funeral.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

Her visit was, I remember, extremely unwelcome to Holmes, for he was immersed at the moment in a very abstruse and complicated problem concerning the peculiar persecution to which John Vincent Harden, the well-known tobacco millionaire, had been subjected.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

“Well, it would be absurd to deny that the case is a very abstruse and complicated one, but I can promise you that I will look into the matter and let you know any points which may strike me.”

(The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)