troublous

Inherited from Middle English troublous, from Anglo-Norman troublous and Middle French troubleus, corresponding to trouble +‎ -ous.

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ˈtɹʌbləs/

troublous (comparative more troublous, superlative most troublous)

1. (obsolete) Of a liquid: thick, muddy, full of sediment.
2. (now archaic or literary) Troubled, confused.
   • 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book III, Canto I”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC:

     On thother side they saw the warlike Mayd / Al in her snow-white smocke, with locks unbowned, / Threatning the point of her avenging blaed; / That with so troublous terror they were all dismayd.

   • 1837, Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History […], volume (please specify |volume=I to III), London: Chapman and Hall, →OCLC, (please specify the book or page number):

     The troublous Day has brawled itself to rest: no lives yet lost but that of one warhorse.

   • 1953, James Baldwin, “Gabriel's Prayer”, in Go Tell It on the Mountain (Penguin Classics), London: Penguin Books, published 2001, →ISBN:

     By and by he fell into a troublous sleep—it seemed that he was going to be stoned, and then he was in battle, and then shipwrecked in the water– […]

3. (now archaic or literary) Causing trouble; troublesome, vexatious.
   • 1891, Mary Noailles Murfree, In the "Stranger People's" Country, Nebraska, published 2005, page 1:

     the mystery, the pervasive melancholy, the vaguely troublous forecast and retrospect which possess the mind in contemplating this sequestered spot, unhallowed save by the sense of a common humanity [...]

   • 1917, Henry James, The Sense of the Past:

     The whole waited, for didn't there hang behind this troublous foreground the vast vagueness which the English themselves spoke of as "abroad"?

• troublously
• troublousness

• trobleus, troblus, troublouse, troublws, trowblews, trubleuse
• trobolous, troubelose, troubelous, trowbelous, trubellus, trubilose (with orthographic svarabhakti)
• troblesse, troubles, trowblas, trowblys, trublys (with final vowel reduction)

Borrowed from Middle French troubleus and Anglo-Norman troublous; by surface analysis, trouble (“disturbance”) +‎ -ous (“-ous”).

• IPA^(key): /ˌtruːb(ə)ˈluːs/, /ˌtrub(ə)ˈluːs/
• IPA^(key): /ˈtruːb(ə)lus/, /ˈtrub(ə)lus/, /-ləs/ (with retraction of stress)

troublous (Late Middle English)

1. (usually of liquid) Muddy, cloudy, opaque.
2. (of weather) Stormy, violent, tempestuous.
3. Troubling, dangerous, challenging.
4. Troubled, disturbed, agitated.

• English: troublous
• Middle Scots: troublous

• “trǒublǒus, adj.”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007.