turgid

Adjective

turgid (comparative more turgid, superlative most turgid)

1. Distended beyond the natural state by some internal agent, especially fluid, or expansive force.
   • I have a turgid limb.
   • A vegetable that is fully moist and firm will seem both crisp and more tender than the same vegetable limp from water loss. When we bite down on a vegetable turgid with water, the already-stressed cell walls readily break and the cells burst open; in a limp vegetable, chewing compresses the walls...2004, Harold McGee, chapter 5, in On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, Scribner, →ISBN

   Synonyms:

   bloated, distended, inflated, swelled, swollen, tumescent, tumid, turgescent, boln, bulging

2. Of a river, inundated with excess water as from a flood; swollen.
   • The Jiet River lay before them, as thick and turgid as a gorged snake, its crosshatched surface reflecting the same ghastly hue that pervaded the Burning Plains.2005, Christopher Paolini, “The Burning Plains”, in Eldest, page 581
3. Overly complex and difficult to understand; grandiloquent; bombastic.
   • These were all basic tenets, but the principals wrote them down as if they had never heard them before—and maybe they hadn’t, or at least not for many years. Perhaps that’s why bureaucratic prose becomes so turgid, whatever the bureaucracy.1976, William Zinsser, On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition, Kindle edition, Harper Perennial, published 2012, →ISBN, page 172
   • Sounding rather suspiciously like Professor H. Bloom’s turgid studies of artistic influenza[…]1996, David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest […], Boston, Mass.; New York, N.Y.: Little, Brown and Company, →ISBN, page 1077

   Synonyms:

   bombastic, grandiose, pompous