involute

• involuted

Borrowed from Latin involutus.

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involute (comparative more involute, superlative most involute)

1. (formal) Difficult to understand; complicated.
   • 1986, John le Carré, A Perfect Spy:

     These vulgar, pleasure-seeking people, so frank and clamorous, were too uninhibited for his shielded and involuted life.

2. (botany) Having the edges rolled with the adaxial side outward.
   • 1992, Rudolf M[athias] Schuster, The Hepaticae and Anthocerotae of North America: East of the Hundredth Meridian, volume V, Chicago, Ill.: Field Museum of Natural History, →ISBN, page 7:

     Furthermore, the free anterior margin of the lobule is arched toward the lobe and is often involute […]

3. (biology, of shells) Having a complex pattern of coils in which younger whorls only partly surround older ones.
4. (biology) Turned inward at the margin, like the exterior lip of the shells of species in genus Cypraea.
5. (biology) Rolled inward spirally.

involute (third-person singular simple present involutes, present participle involuting, simple past and past participle involuted)

1. To roll or curl inwards.

involute (plural involutes)

1. (geometry) A curve that cuts all tangents of another curve at right angles; traced by a point on a string that unwinds from a curved object.

• involution
• advolute
• convolute
• evolute
• revolute

• “involute”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.
• William Dwight Whitney, Benjamin E[li] Smith, editors (1911), “involute”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., →OCLC.

involute

1. feminine plural of involuto

involūte

1. vocative masculine singular of involūtus

• “involute”, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879) A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
• involute in Gaffiot, Félix (1934) Dictionnaire illustré latin-français, Hachette.