a. [ad. L. flexuōs-us: see FLEXUOSE and -OUS.]
1. Full of bends or curves; winding, sinuous. Now chiefly in scientific use, said of animal or vegetable structures.
1605. Bacon, Adv. Learn., II. vi. § 6. 28. Physic carrieth men in narrow and restrained ways, subject to many accidents of impediments, imitating the ordinary flexuous courses of Nature.
a. 1661. Fuller, Worthies Barks. (1662), 81. Parted first with the Isis, then with the flexuous River of Thames.
1828. Stark, Elem. Nat. Hist., I. 420. Lateral line flexuous; tail slightly bilobate.
1860. O. W. Holmes, Elsie V., x. She had caught up her castanets, and rattled them as she danced with a kind of passionate fierceness, her lithe body undulating with flexuous grace, her diamond eyes glittering, her round arms wreathing and unwinding, alive and vibrant to the tips of the slender fingers.
1874. T. Hardy, Madding Crowd, I. xxv. 282. The consisted in about equal proportions of gnarled and flexuous forms, the former being the men, the latter the women.
2. Moving in bends or waves, undulating. rare.
1626. Bacon, Sylva, § 820. The Flexuous Burning of Flames doth shew the Aire beginneth to be vnquiet.
1872. Darwin, Emotions, Introd., 11. Man himself cannot express love and humility by external signs, so plainly as does a dog, when with drooping ears, hanging lips, flexuous body, and wagging tail, he meets his beloved master.
Hence Flexuously adv. in a flexuous manner.
1846. Dana, Zooph. (1848), 382. This small, neat species, grows … flexuously branched stems.
1872. H. C. Wood, Fresh-W. Algæ, 34. Flexuously curved.
