- 1痛苦難熬的、折磨人的。注意跟 tortuous（曲折的、蜿蜒的）拼字幾乎一樣但意思不同：torturous 是「像酷刑一樣難受」，tortuous 是「彎彎曲曲」。
Torturous means so painful or so unpleasant that going through it feels like torture. It is a strong word, and it is usually an — people say it about long meetings, hot afternoons, boring films, slow queues, and bad exams. "A torturous three-hour lecture." Occasionally it is literal, about real physical suffering, and then it is very heavy indeed.
The important thing is the confusion with TORTUOUS, which is spelled almost the same but has no r in the middle of the second part: tor-tu-ous. Tortuous means full of twists and bends — a tortuous mountain road, a tortuous explanation that never gets to the point. Torturous means it hurt. A tortuous road has many curves; a torturous road journey made you want to cry.
They do come from the same twisting Latin root, and that is exactly why they are so easy to mix up. Even native English writers get them wrong, and newspapers correct it constantly. If you want to be safe: think TORTURE inside TORTUROUS. If the pain is there, the r is there.
Stress it on the first part: TOR-cher-us.
One more thing — because it is so strong, it can sound dramatic. If a student "the homework was torturous", it works as a joke or as a complaint among friends, but in formal writing it will read as over-the-top. "Extremely difficult" is calmer.
組成torture + -ous. The ending -ous turns a noun into an adjective meaning "full of, having the quality of" — so torturous is "having the quality of torture". It came into English through Old French from Latin tortūra, itself from the root meaning "to twist".
原始詞典資料2 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
torturousadj/ˈtɔɹt͡ʃəɹəs/
- 1
Of or pertaining to torture.
- 2
Painful, excruciating, torturing.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。