Adjective

(en adjective)

(economics) capable of competing successfully

of or pertaining to competition

* {{quote-news

, year=2012 , date=September 7 , author=Phil McNulty , title=Moldova 0-5 England , work=BBC Sport citation , page= , passage=Manchester United's Tom Cleverley impressed on his first competitive start and Lampard demonstrated his continued worth at international level in a performance that was little more than a stroll once England swiftly exerted their obvious authority.}}

(of someone's character) inclined to compete

(biochemistry) inhibiting the action of an enzyme by binding with it

(euphemistically, of prices) cheap, especially used of quality products

Adjective

(en adjective)

Hard, not easy, requiring much effort.

* (Nathaniel Hawthorne) (1804-1864)

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

* 2008 , Daniel Goleman, Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama (ISBN 0307483762), 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.

* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-08-03, volume=408, issue=8847, magazine=(The Economist)

, title= Boundary problems , passage=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.

Hard to manage, uncooperative, troublesome.