掲示板 Forums - 「まどろっこしい」の意味

Hi there お負け犬さん! It's seems to have been 4 months since you asked, but I now happened upon your question and have found some interesting information. Hopefully it's a satisfactory answer. If you have already looked into the matter yourself since then I hope that it could at least be of some use to somebody else.

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まどろっこしい, a variant of まどろこしい and まどろっこい, has the meaning of "dull (e.g. of movement or reaction), sluggish" and "irritating". The word roughly conveys a feeling of irritation over somebody being sluggish. An example: 質問者から回答者まで通訳が三人も間に入るなんてまどろっこしいね (It's so sluggish and irritating to have three interpreters between the questioner and the respondent.)

The word in question is related to the adjective 間怠っこしい (まだるっこしい), which is a variant of まだるこい or まだるっこい. The meaning here is "slow, tedious, sluggish, dull" and "irritating". In other words, they have roughly the same meaning and look very much alike even though the pronunciation differs a bit. Do note that まどろっこしい seems to be a lot more common in usage than まだるっこしい. (I have also seen まどろっこしい written as 間怠っこしい, but only in a rare occasion.)

The latter and perhaps also the word you brought up are in turn related to 間怠い (まだるい): "slow, tedious, sluggish, dull", and of course 怠い (だるい): "sluggish, languid, listless, heavy (heart, legs, etc.), dull".

So we can discern a pattern here, in both meaning and form. It could be the case that だる from だるい had changed into どろ in まどろっこしい.

However, there is a different explanation floating around. The verb 手間取る (てまどる), meaning "to take more time than expected, to take a long time, to be delayed", could have been the word from which まどろっこしい was derived. With the 手 removed you only have まどる, which could have changed into まどろ (possibly as a conjugation into まどろう) and then turned into an い-adjective with the help of こい/こしい. If this is the case the word could be said to make more sense as 間取ろっこしい rather than 間怠っこしい, but I can't say for sure which origin is the most likely.

It's a bit of an etymological mess, isn't it? Unless we get a real linguist specialised in a relevant field in here we will probably not get any clarifications.