tortured

Adjective

tortured (comparative more tortured, superlative most tortured)

1. Having been subjected to torture, mental or physical.
   • Those who have escaped the dark and terrible aspects of life will find my brutality, my flash of rage in our final tragedy, easy enough to blame; for they know what is wrong as well as any, but not what is possible to tortured men. But those who have been under the shadow, who have gone down at...1898, H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, London: William Heinemann, page 219
2. Involving suffering and difficulty.
   • a tortured history
3. Of literature, burdened by unnecessary complexity, obfuscation, abstruseness, etc.
   • tortured prose
   • Language was often tortured to disguise the racial nature of hazardous experimentation.2008, Harriet A. Washington, “Profitable Wonders”, in Medical Apartheid, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, page 59