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Embarrassing; puzzling; troublesome. "Perplexing thoughts." Milton.

To check by perplexing; to disconcert, frustrate, or defeat; to thwart. "A baffled purpose." De Quincey. A suitable scripture ready to repel and baffle them all. South. Calculations so difficult as to have baffled, until within a . . . recent period, the most enlightened nations. Prescott. The mere intricacy of a quest…

Distressing; worrying; perplexing; corroding; as, carking cares.

Obscure; difficult; perplexing; trying; as, a crabbed author. "Crabbed eloquence." Chaucer. How charming is divine philosophy! Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose. Milton.

Crabbed; difficult, or perplexing. "Persius is crabby, because ancient." Marston.

To entangle; to involve; to make perplexing. [Obs.] It makes men troublesome, and intricates all wise discourses. Jer. Taylor.

Perplexed with turns and windings; winding; intricate; confusing; perplexing; embarrassing; as, mazy error. Milton. To range amid the mazy thicket. Spenser. To run the ring, and trace the mazy round. Dryden.

The quality of being perplexing; tendency to perplex. [Obs.] Dr. H. More.

Like a thorn or thorns; hence, figuratively, troublesome; vexatious; harassing; perplexing. "The thorny point of bare distress." Shak. The steep and thorny way to heaven. Shak. Thorny rest-harrow (Bot.), rest-harrow. -- Thorny trefoil, a prickly plant of the genus Fagonia (F. Cretica, etc.).

Free from perplexing connection; as, the question comes into court unembarrassed with irrelevant matter.

eb of life with hardly a . . . thread of rose-color or gold. Hawthorne. Such has been the perplexing ingenuity of commentators that it is difficult to extricate the truth from the web of conjectures. W. Irving.