difficultとは 意味・読み方・使い方

発音

• IPA: /ˈdɪfɪkəlt/

形容詞

difficult (comparative more difficult, superlative most difficult)

1. Hard, not easy, requiring much effort.

   difficult of accomplishment (a somewhat dated way of saying "difficult to accomplish")

   However, the difficult weather conditions will ensure Yunnan has plenty of freshwater.

   • 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne, chapter 17, in The Scarlet Letter, a Romance, Boston, Mass.: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, →OCLC:

     There is not the strength or courage left me to venture into the wide, strange, difficult world, alone.

   • 2008, Daniel Goleman, Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama, →ISBN, page 199:

     In adults, the same kind of anger has been studied in people trying to solve a very difficult math problem. Though the tough math problem is very frustrating, there is an active attempt to solve the problem and meet the goal.

   • 2013 August 3, “Boundary problems”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8847:

     Economics is a messy discipline: too fluid to be a science, too rigorous to be an art. Perhaps it is fitting that economists’ most-used metric, gross domestic product (GDP), is a tangle too. […] But as a foundation for analysis it is highly subjective: it rests on difficult decisions about what counts as a territory, what counts as output and how to value it. Indeed, economists are still tweaking it.

2. (often of a person, or a horse, etc) Hard to manage, uncooperative, troublesome.

   Stop being difficult and eat your broccoli—you know it's good for you.

3. (obsolete) Unable or unwilling.
   • 1749, Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling:

     “I hope, madam,” said Jones, “my charming Lady Bellaston will be as difficult to believe anything against one who is so sensible of the many obligations she hath conferred upon him.”

使用する際の注意点

Difficult implies that considerable mental effort or physical skill is required, or that obstacles are to be overcome which call for sagacity and skill in the doer; as, a difficult task. Thus, “hard” is not always synonymous with difficult. Examples include a difficult operation in surgery and a difficult passage by an author (that is, a passage which is hard to understand).

同意語

• burdensome, cumbersome, hard
• see also Thesaurus:difficult

派生語

動詞

difficult (third-person singular simple present difficults, present participle difficulting, simple past and past participle difficulted)

1. (obsolete, transitive) To make difficult; to impede; to perplex.
   • August 9 1678, William Temple, letter to Joseph Williamson

     their Excellencies having desisted from their pretensions , which had difficulted the peace

参照

Further reading

• “difficult”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
• William Dwight Whitney, Benjamin E[li] Smith, editors (1911), “difficult”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., →OCLC.

語源

Back-formation from difficulte (“difficulty”).

発音

• IPA: /diˈfikult/, /diˈfikəl(t)/

形容詞

difficult

1. (rare, Late Middle English) difficult, challenging

派生した語

• English: difficult
  • → Scots: diffiquilt, defeeckwalt, deffeckwalt

参照

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