ppl. a. [f. prec. + -ED.]
1. Twisted, esp. twisted together or round itself; drawn awry or out of shape by a twisting action.
1622. Massinger, Virg. Mart., V. i. I’ll … hang thee In a contorted chain of icicles, In the frigid zone.
1674. J. Wright, trans. Seneca’s Thyestes, 10. What makes Thee menace thus with thy contorted Snakes?
1774. Pennant, Tour Scot. in 1772, 165. The rocks are contorted.
1794. Martyn, Rousseau’s Bot., xxv. 368. The legumes are contorted.
1878. Black, Green Past., v. 37. All over his contorted visage.
fig. 1652. Gaule, Magastrom., 70. Whether those derivations … be not contorted, jejune … ridiculous.
2. Bot. ‘An arrangement of petals or corolline lobes, when each piece, being oblique in figure, and overlapping its neighbor by one margin, has its other margin in like manner overlapped by that which stands next it’ (Treas. Bot., 1866).
1760. Ellis, in Phil. Trans., LI. 934. Contorted flowers, that is those monopetalous flowers, whose lobes, or sections of the limb of their petals, turn all to the right hand.
1870. Hooker, Stud. Flora, p. xv. Convolvulaceæ … corolla … plaited and contorted in bud.
b. Contorted-convolutive adj.: convolute with some degree of contortion.
1830. Lindley, Nat. Syst. Bot., 218. The æstivation … on account of the lateral and somewhat contorted twisting of the nearly equal segments, contorted-convolutive.
