Difficult vs Cryptic - What's the difference?
difficult | cryptic | Related terms |
Hard, not easy, requiring much effort.
* (Nathaniel Hawthorne) (1804-1864)
* 2008 , Daniel Goleman, Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama (ISBN 0307483762), page 199:
* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-08-03, volume=408, issue=8847, magazine=(The Economist)
, title= Hard to manage, uncooperative, troublesome.
Having hidden meaning.
Mystified or of an obscure nature.
* Glanvill
Involving use of code or cipher/cypher.
(zoology) Well camouflaged; having good camouflage.
(informal) A cryptic crossword.
* 1996 , Mary McCarthy, Remember Me (page 85)
* 2009 , Bill Taylor, Building a crossword'' (in ''Toronto Star , 1 February 2009)
Difficult is a related term of cryptic.
As adjectives the difference between difficult and cryptic
is that difficult is hard, not easy, requiring much effort while cryptic is having hidden meaning.As a verb difficult
is (obsolete|transitive) to make difficult; to impede; to perplex.As a noun cryptic is
(informal) a cryptic crossword.difficult
English
Adjective
(en adjective)- There is not the strength or courage left me to venture into the wide, strange, and difficult world, alone.
- 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.
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.
Usage notes
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: Other examples include ''a ''difficult'' operation in surgery'' and ''a ''difficult'' passage by an author (that is, a passage which is hard to understand).Synonyms
* burdensome, cumbersome, hard * see alsoDerived terms
* difficultlyStatistics
*External links
* * 1000 English basic wordscryptic
English
(wikipedia cryptic)Alternative forms
* cryptick (obsolete)Adjective
(en adjective)- Her [nature's] more cryptic ways of working.
- Lonomia caterpillars are extremely cryptic .
Noun
(en noun)- He settled down to the cryptic in the Independent . He loved his crossword. It kept him mentally active, just as gossip did his wife.
- This writer has been solving cryptics for 40 years and can usually crack Araucaria, though it might take a couple of days.