Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a relatively obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar, another brick to add to the wall of your vocabulary. This week's word:
LABYRINTHINE
The original Labyrinth was the fearsomely complicated maze that Daedalus built for King Minos of Crete to house the Minotaur. Theseus, advised by Ariadne, Minos' daughter, used a skein of thread to find his way back out after killing the Minotaur. (The cad subsequently abandoned her.)
The etymology is obscure, but one conjecture is that it has a connection to the labrys, the Cretan double-bladed ax.
In the modern sense, a labyrinth is a maze with no dead ends and a single bordered winding path leading to the center, which people walk for prayer or meditation.
Figuratively, a labyrinth is a complicated, perplexing course of affairs. It is in that context that the adjective labyrinthine (pronounced lab-uh-RIN-theen) most frequently occurs, for example, when people describe the labyrinthine process of applying for federal employment.
Example: From " 'X-Files' stars hope fans still believe" by Anthony Breznican, USAToday, 2008: "But by the time the series wrapped in 2002, the labyrinthine alien-invasion plot at the source of the show's popularity had become a confusing muddle, and Duchovny had dropped out to appear in only a handful of episodes in the final seasons."