Foul vs Difficult - What's the difference?
foul | difficult | Related terms |
Covered with, or containing unclean matter; polluted; nasty; defiled
* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-29, volume=407, issue=8842, page=29, magazine=(The Economist)
, title= obscene or profane; abusive.
Hateful; detestable; unpleasant
* Milton
Loathsome; disgusting; as, a foul disease.
(obsolete) Ugly; homely; poor.
* Shakespeare
Not favorable; unpropitious; not fair or advantageous; as, a foul wind; a foul road; cloudy or rainy; stormy; not fair; -- said of the weather, sky, etc.
* Shakespeare
Not conforming to the established rules and customs of a game, conflict, test, etc.; unfair; dishonest; dishonorable; cheating.
(nautical) Having freedom of motion interfered with by collision or entanglement; entangled; - opposed to clear; as, a rope or cable may get foul while paying it out.
(baseball) Outside of the base lines; in foul territory.
To make dirty.
To besmirch.
To clog or obstruct.
(nautical) To entangle.
(basketball) To make contact with an opposing player in order to gain advantage.
(baseball) To hit outside of the baselines.
To become clogged.
To become entangled.
(basketball) To commit a foul.
(baseball) To hit a ball outside of the baselines.
(sports) A breach of the rules of a game, especially one involving inappropriate contact with an opposing player in order to gain an advantage; as, for example, foot-tripping in soccer, or contact of any kind in basketball.
* {{quote-news
, year=2011
, date=December 10
, author=Arindam Rej
, title=Norwich 4 - 2 Newcastle
, work=BBC Sport
Gosling's plight worsened when he was soon shown a red card for a foul on Martin.}} (bowling) A (usually accidental) contact between a bowler and the lane before the bowler has released the ball.
(baseball) A foul ball, a ball which has been hit outside of the base lines.
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.
Foul is a related term of difficult.
As a noun foul
is foul (a breach of the rules of a game).As an adjective difficult is
hard, not easy, requiring much effort.As a verb difficult is
(obsolete|transitive) to make difficult; to impede; to perplex.foul
English
(Webster 1913)Etymology 1
From (etyl), from (etyl) . More at (l).Adjective
(er)Unspontaneous combustion, passage=Since the mid-1980s, when Indonesia first began to clear its bountiful forests on an industrial scale in favour of lucrative palm-oil plantations, “haze” has become an almost annual occurrence in South-East Asia. The cheapest way to clear logged woodland is to burn it, producing an acrid cloud of foul white smoke that, carried by the wind, can cover hundreds, or even thousands, of square miles.}}
- Who first seduced them to that foul revolt?
- Let us, like merchants, show our foulest wares.
- So foul a sky clears not without a storm.
Usage notes
* Nouns to which "foul" is often applied: play, ball, language, breath, smell, odor, water, weather, deed.Synonyms
* shameful; odious; wretchedDerived terms
* afoul * befoul * fall foul * nonfoul * nonfoulingEtymology 2
From (etyl) .Verb
(en verb)- to foul the face or hands with mire
- She's fouled her diaper.
- He's fouled his reputation.
- The hair has fouled the drain.
- The kelp has fouled the prop.
- Smith fouled him hard.
- Jones fouled the ball off the facing of the upper deck.
- ''The drain fouled .
- The prop fouled on the kelp.
- Smith fouled within the first minute of the quarter.
- Jones fouled for strike one.
Noun
(en noun)citation, page= , passage=A second Norwich goal in four minutes arrived after some dire Newcastle defending. Gosling gave the ball away with a sloppy back-pass, allowing Crofts to curl in a cross that the unmarked Morison powered in with a firm, 12-yard header.
Gosling's plight worsened when he was soon shown a red card for a foul on Martin.}}
- Jones hit a foul up over the screen.
External links
* * * ----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.
