Saturday, June 28, 2008

mazy

mazy \MAY-zee\, adjective:

Resembling a maze in form or complexity; winding; intricate; confusing; perplexing.

All day and all night, the waves threw themselves dementedly against their rocky barricade, sending an endless roar like heavy traffic through the glacial rooms and mazy, echoing corridors of the old house.
-- Jonathan Coe, The House of Sleep
By now some 20 characters are caught in the turns and baffles of Mr. Dunne's mazy plot.
-- George Stade, "A Fisherman of Guilt", New York Times, March 28, 1982
Unfortunately, the result is a dense, mazy book, a book that instead of illuminating the artist's work only succeeds in erecting a pretentious literary scrim between it and the average reader.
-- Michiko Kakutani, review of About Rothko, by Dore Ashton, New York Times, November 7, 1983

Mazy is the adjective form of maze, which comes from Middle English mase, from masen, "to confuse, to daze," from Old English amasian, "to confound." It is related to amaze, which originally meant "to bewilder."

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