Obstruse

Part of speech: adjective

Pronunciation: /əbˈstɹuːs/

Definitions

1. Difficult to comprehend due to its complex and obscure nature
2. Not easily grasped because it is highly complicated or abstruse in subject matter
3. Requiring significant effort to decipher due to complexity and lack of clarity

Etymology: "Obstruse" is a misspelling-turned-word: it is an alteration of "abstruse", the word it has been mistakenly swapped for. "Abstruse" comes from Latin "abstrusus", the past participle of "abstrudere", meaning "to thrust away" or "to conceal", built from "ab-" ("away") and "trudere" ("to thrust"). The sense of something hidden away and therefore hard to reach gradually became the sense of something hard to understand. The "ob-" spelling appears through confusion with the prefix "ob-" (meaning "against" or "in the way of"), which sounds similar and suggests obstruction, a fitting association for a word about difficulty. Because the meaning of "abstruse" already covers the sense of obscure complexity, "obstruse" adds no new idea; it is simply a variant spelling that has crept into use.

Synonyms: obscure, enigmatic, cryptic, esoteric, ambiguous

Antonyms: clear, obvious, straightforward, comprehensible, evident