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From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.44 [gcide]:
Knotty \Knot"ty\, adjective [Compar. {Knottier}; superl. {Knottiest}.]
1. Full of knots; knotted; having many knots; as, knotty timber; a knotty rope.
2. Hard; rugged; as, a knotty head. [R.] --Rewe.
3. Difficult; intricate; perplexed.
A knotty point to which we now proceed --Pope.
From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:
knotty
adjective
1: making great mental demands; hard to comprehend or solve; "a baffling problem"; "I faced the knotty problem of what to have for breakfast"; "a problematic situation at home" [syn: {baffling}, {problematic}, {problematical}]
2: used of old persons or old trees; covered with knobs or knots; "gnarled and knotted hands"; "a knobbed stick" [syn: {gnarled}, {gnarly}, {knotted}, {knobbed}]
3: highly involved or intricate; "the Byzantine tax structure"; "convoluted legal language"; "convoluted reasoning"; "intricate needlework"; "an intricate labyrinth of refined phraseology"; "the plot was too involved"; "a knotty problem"; "got his way by labyrinthine maneuvering"; "Oh, what a tangled web we weave"- Sir Walter Scott; "tortuous legal procedures"; "tortuous negotiations lasting for months" [syn: {Byzantine}, {convoluted}, {intricate}, {involved}, {labyrinthine}, {tangled}, {tortuous}] [also: {knottiest}, {knottier}]
From Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 [moby-thes]:
88 Moby Thesaurus words for "knotty": Byzantine, Herculean, abstruse, arduous, beyond one, brutal, burled, complex, complicated, crabbed, cramp, critical, daedal, delicate, demanding, difficile, difficult, effortful, elaborate, exacting, formidable, garbled, gnarled, gnarly, gordian, hairy, hard, hard to understand, hard-earned, hard-fought, intricate, involved, jawbreaking, jumbled, knobbed, knobbly, knobby, knoblike, knotted, knurled, knurly, laborious, labyrinthine, lumpy, mean, no picnic, nodal, noded, nodiform, nodose, nodular, nodulated, noduled, not easy, nubbled, nubbly, nubby, obfuscated, obscure, obscured, operose, overtechnical, perplexed, rigorous, rough, rugged, scrambled, set with thorns, severe, sophisticated, spiny, steep, sticky, strenuous, studded, terrible, thorny, ticklish, toilsome, torose, tough, tricky, tubercular, tuberculous, tuberose, tuberous, uphill, wicked
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