ponderous
/ˈpɒnd(ə)rəs
/adjective
1Slow and clumsy because of great weight: a swarthy, ponderous giant of a man...
- He was too slow, too ponderous; he had a big, heavy punch, but there was nothing spontaneous about him in the ring.
- ‘A lot of big fighters are slow and ponderous, but I apply myself on my speed as opposed to power,’ he said.
- I'll box and battle him, and make him look slow and ponderous.
Synonyms
clumsy, slow, heavy, awkward, lumbering, slow-moving, cumbersome, heavy-footed, ungainly, graceless, maladroit, uncoordinated, blundering, like a bull in a china shop
informal clodhopping, clunky
archaic lubberly
rare cumbrous
1.1(Especially of speech or writing) dull or laborious: the show is loaded down with ponderous one-liners...
- House of the Spirits was stilted and ponderous and written with a poor command of the nuances of English.
- Most contemporary Baptists would find a sermon like this ponderous and pedantic.
- There's no point in comparing the graphic novel Road to Perdition with the respectable though somewhat ponderous movie based on it.
Synonyms
laboured, laborious, dull, awkward, clumsy, forced, stilted, unnatural, artificial, turgid, stodgy, stolid, lifeless, plodding, pedestrian, boring, uninteresting, solemn, serious, tedious, monotonous, dry, dreary, pedantic;
ornate, elaborate, over-elaborate, intricate, convoluted, verbose, long-winded, windy, prolix
Derivatives
ponderosity
- The chilling arrogance of technological change will enlighten the modern political climate and austere reverberations of gender identification disorders will punctuate spiritual bombastic ponderosity.
- TSET is a platitudinous parcel of impenetrable ponderosity, regrettably but manifestly lacking in clarifying conciseness or concatenated cogency; in short, too many big words.
ponderously
/ adverb ...- And at that very instant something did, then moved slowly, ponderously but very heavily upstream.
- As I said, the exhibition has set out deliberately, and even ponderously, to enlarge our image of Turkishness and to reveal far more about the history of these varied peoples than concentrating on Ottoman art would have achieved.
- Instead of sweating underneath monstrous loads, moving as slowly and ponderously as beasts of burden, we cruised the trail like coyotes, heads up, alert, eyes on the horizon.
ponderousness
/ noun ...- The sheer ponderousness of the panel's opinion - the mountain of verbiage it must deploy to explain away these fourteen short words of constitutional text - refutes its thesis far more convincingly than anything I might say.
- In conveying so much about Adams's goodness, in vivid and smooth prose, McCullough slights Adams's intellectual ambitions, his brilliance and his ponderousness, his pettiness and his sometimes disabling pessimism.
- Gibson's ponderousness, however, is different, born not from the traditional Hollywood fear of offending religious sensibilities, but rather from the distinctive character of his own commitment.
Origin
Late Middle English: via French from Latin ponderosus, from pondus, ponder- 'weight'.
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