Difficult vs Thorny - What's the difference?
difficult | thorny | 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 thorns or spines
troublesome or vexatious
* Shakespeare
aloof and irritable
* Louisa May Alcott, Good Wives
Difficult is a related term of thorny.
As adjectives the difference between difficult and thorny
is that difficult is hard, not easy, requiring much effort while thorny is having thorns or spines.As a verb difficult
is (obsolete|transitive) to make difficult; to impede; to perplex.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 wordsthorny
English
Adjective
(er)- the steep and thorny way to heaven
- 'Come, Jo, don't be thorny . After studying himself to a skeleton all the week, a fellow deserves petting, and ought to get it.'