Vocab Builder: Tortuous and Torturous

September 25, 2008

One letter can make a big difference sometimes.

"Tortuous" and "torturous" both use the same prefix, "tor-," but mean somewhat different things. "Tor-" means "to twist" or "to bend," which probably isn't a good thing, but isn't necessarily so bad as, say, torture.

Tortuous

I'll start with the tough one. Literally, "tortuous" (this is the one without the added "r") means "twisting" or "bending," as in a road. Language (say, a convoluted legal argument) can also be described as "tortuous."

Some dictionaries include a secondary meaning of "tortuous" that gets closer to "torture" and "torturous;" something like, "deceitfully indirect or morally crooked." Using this meaning, you might say that the reasoning employed by a politician is "tortuous."

The most important thing to remember, though, is while "tortuous" refers to something indirect (which is usually a bad thing), it doesn't have the strong negative connotation of the very similar word...

Torturous

You're probably familiar with the word "torture"--the act of causing great physical pain. "Torturous" refers to the suffering caused by that act.

Both of these words are adjectives, and while they can on occasion be used to describe the same things, it's crucial to understand where they diverge.

In short, "torturous" is worse. An article contrasting two similar words with nearly identical spellings can be, at times, tortuous. But facing a GRE question on test day and not remembering the difference can be downright torturous.

Jeff Sackmann is a test-prep tutor based in New York City and the author of Total GRE Math, among other GRE and GMAT resources.

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