An adjective from psychology: related to an Oedipus complex. In Freud's old idea, a young child — he talked mostly about boys — feels a tangle of love and jealousy toward one parent and rivalry toward the other, in a pattern he named after the Greek story of Oedipus. Writers still use oedipal for that family triangle, and, more loosely, for a grown person who seems stuck in a fight with a father-figure or unusually tied to a mother. It is a formal, specialist word. You will meet it in essays and clinics, not in everyday chat. People do stretch it; a close mother and son is not automatically “oedipal” in the clinical sense, though magazines sometimes use it that way.