Word.ws English Dictionary

tortious

/ˈtɔːʃəs/US/ˈtɔɹʃəs/

tortious adjective: wrongful; harmful. Also the misspelling of tortuous.

Adjective

tortious (comparative more tortious, superlative most tortious)

  1. (obsolete) Wrongful; harmful.
    • he found great store of hoorded threasure, / The which that tyrant gathered had by wrong / And tortious powre […]1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book IV, Canto IX”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC
    Synonyms:
    wrongful
  2. Of, pertaining to, or characteristic of torts.

Also used as

tortious is also the misspelling of tortuous.

Synonyms of tortious

Forms of tortious

comparativemore tortious
superlativemost tortious

Origin of tortious

Inherited from Middle English torcious, from Anglo-Norman torcious. By surface analysis, tort + -ious.

Words formed from tortious

Phrases with tortious

Questions about tortious

What does tortious mean?
Tortious means wrongful; harmful.
What part of speech is tortious?
Tortious is an adjective.
How do you pronounce tortious?
Tortious is pronounced /ˈtɔːʃəs/ (UK).

Words near tortious in the dictionary

  1. tortillas
  2. tortillon
  3. tortillons
  4. tortillé
  5. tortional
  6. tortious
  7. tortious interference
  8. tortious interferences
  9. tortiously
  10. tortiousness
  11. tortipelvic

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tortious (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-tortious.wav.

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