meandering
/miˈandərɪŋ
/adjective
1Following a winding course: meandering rivers flow at vastly different rates...
- Slowly the landscape changed as the two elementals followed the meandering river.
- The humans pursued a meandering course through the forest.
- The family acquired a former cereal farm, a 300 hectare spread extending along both sides of the meandering river Ega.
Synonyms
winding, windy, zigzag, zigzagging, twisting, turning, curving, serpentine, sinuous, snaking, snaky, twisty, tortuous
rare anfractuous, flexuous, meandrous
1.1Proceeding in a convoluted or undirected fashion: a brilliant sample of meandering discourse a florid and rather meandering melody...
- The ensuing 86 minutes unfold in a slow, meandering fashion, yet somehow remain likeable even if nothing much happens.
- When read straight through, the narrative digressions take the reader on a meandering path that resembles hypertextual linking.
- Short and stylistically different than much of the rest of the album, it features Hayden in top vocal form, gently wrapping his words around a meandering piano melody.
Synonyms
rambling, circuitous, roundabout, digressive, discursive, indirect, diffuse, tortuous, convoluted
rare anfractuous
noun (usually meanderings)
1An act of following a winding course: ox-bow lagoons left by the river’s meanderings...
- Radlauer places her palm on the map showing the Mississippi's meanderings.
1.1An act of wandering in a leisurely or aimless manner: in the course of his meanderings through the city...
- Bath Walks records a series of meanderings around the City of Bath, identifying architectural details and revealing new relationships between the patches of buildings and its streets.
- One distinguished exponent is Van Morrison, whose Astral Weeks album detailed his meanderings through Cyprus Avenue, a tree-lined road near his childhood home in east Belfast.
- It was on one of these nocturnal meanderings that I spotted a young girl walking along about a block ahead of me.
1.2 [mass noun] Convoluted or undirected thought or language: he has a penchant for obscure verbal meanderings...
- For example, the title track's obscured by excessive meandering, never giving any indication of the song's center, or the composition's significance.
- Emerging from their apparently aimless meanderings came an essential truthfulness, a revelation of how things are.
- Combined with this talent, Sellers had an incredible ability to improvise and wander away from the script in wild comic meanderings, which, on many occasions, prevented his co-star from keeping a straight face.