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/bˈɪzəntˌaɪn/ /bˈɪzəntˌin/ Listen

Byzantine

adjective

(Written also Bizantine)

1.

Of or relating to the Eastern Orthodox Church or the rites performed in it. "Byzantine rites"

2.

Of or relating to or characteristic of the Byzantine Empire or the ancient city of Byzantium.

3.

Highly complex or intricate and occasionally devious. Synonyms: convoluted, involved, knotty, tangled, tortuous. "Byzantine methods for holding on to his chairmanship" , "Convoluted legal language" , "Convoluted reasoning" , "The plot was too involved" , "A knotty problem" , "Got his way by labyrinthine maneuvering" , "Oh, what a tangled web we weave" , "Tortuous legal procedures" , "Tortuous negotiations lasting for months"

noun

1.

A native or inhabitant of Byzantium or of the Byzantine Empire.

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WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University

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"Byzantine" Quotes from Famous Books

... sanction—some holy thing, some book or gospel or some new prophet from the desert, something which would cast over the whole ugly mechanism of German war the glamour of the old torrential raids which crumpled the Byzantine Empire and shook the walls of Vienna? Islam is a fighting creed, and the mullah still stands in the pulpit with the Koran in one hand and a drawn sword in the other. Supposing there is some Ark of the Covenant ...

— Greenmantle • John Buchan

... interesting about their own disappointment. And similarly even those who are truly irritated by the unfamiliar fashions of worship in a place like Jerusalem, do not know how to discover what is interesting in the very existence of what is irritating. For instance, they talk of Byzantine decay or barbaric delusion, and they generally go away with an impression that the ritual and symbolism is something dating from the Dark Ages. But if they would really note the details of their surroundings, or even of their sensations, they ...

— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton

... although it could quite as well be from [Greek: tziphra]. More rarely O'Creat uses [circle with bar], applying the name cyfra to both forms. Frater Sigsboto[204] (c. 1150) uses the same symbol. Other peculiar forms are noted by Heiberg[205] as being in use among the Byzantine Greeks in the fifteenth century. It is evident from the text that some of these writers did not understand the import of ...

— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith

... a vulgar type), exaggerated hips, and above all by the phallus. The demon turned into the clown or buffoon, but the phallus was kept as an emblem of his role, like the later cap and bells of the fool, until the fifth century of the Christian era in the West, and until the fall of the Byzantine empire. In the Hellenistic period the clown took the role of the Olympic god, and wore the phallus. The Phlyakes in lower Italy had the same emblem and it was worn in the atellan plays of the Romans.[1546] In the early Christian ...

— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... that the modern Greeks are in the main the descendants of the population that inhabited Greece in the earlier centuries of Byzantine rule. Owing to the operation of various causes, historical, social and economic, that population was composed of many heterogeneous elements and represented in very limited degree the race which repulsed the Persians and built the Parthenon. The internecine conflicts of ...

— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

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