Painful vs Harrowing - What's the difference?
painful | harrowing |
Causing pain or distress, either physical or mental.
Afflicted or suffering with pain (of a body part or, formerly, of a person).
Requiring effort or labor; difficult, laborious.
* 1624 , John Smith, Generall Historie , in Kupperman 1988, p. 142:
* 1843 , , Book 2, Ch. 2
Causing pain or distress.
* 2006 , , Concrete: Killer Smile , Dark Horse Books, cover text
*{{quote-magazine, date=2013-01
, author=Brian Hayes
, title=Father of Fractals
, volume=101, issue=1, page=62
, magazine=
As adjectives the difference between painful and harrowing
is that painful is causing pain or distress, either physical or mental while harrowing is causing pain or distress.As a verb harrowing is
.As a noun harrowing is
the process of breaking up earth with a harrow.painful
English
(wikipedia painful)Alternative forms
* painfull (archaic)Adjective
(en-adj)- The men bestow their times in fishing, hunting, warres, and such manlike exercises, scorning to be seene in any woman-like exercise, which is the cause that the women be very painefull , and the men often idle.
- For twenty generations, here was the earthly arena where painful living men worked out their life-wrestle
Synonyms
* (full of pain) doleful, sorrowful, irksome, annoying * (requiring labor or toil) laborious, exertingAntonyms
* (causing pain) painless, painfreeDerived terms
* painfully * painfulnessharrowing
English
Verb
(head)Adjective
(en adjective)- Harrowing journeys down the dark roads of anger, violence, and madness
citation, passage=Toward the end of the war, Benoit was sent off on his own with forged papers; he wound up working as a horse groom at a chalet in the Loire valley. Mandelbrot describes this harrowing youth with great sangfroid.}}