What's the difference between
and
Enter two words to compare and contrast their definitions, origins, and synonyms to better understand how those words are related.

Struggle vs Difficult - What's the difference?

struggle | difficult |

As verbs the difference between struggle and difficult

is that struggle is to strive, to labour in difficulty, to fight (for or against), to contend while difficult is to make difficult; to impede; to perplex.

As a noun struggle

is strife, contention, great effort.

As an adjective difficult is

hard, not easy, requiring much effort.

struggle

English

Alternative forms

* (l), (l) (obsolete)

Noun

(en noun)
  • Strife, contention, great effort.
  • *, chapter=23
    • , title= The Mirror and the Lamp , passage=The struggle with ways and means had recommenced, more difficult now a hundredfold than it had been before, because of their increasing needs. Their income disappeared as a little rivulet that is swallowed by the thirsty ground. He worked night and day to supplement it.}}

    Verb

    (struggl)
  • To strive, to labour in difficulty, to fight (for'' or ''against ), to contend.
  • :
  • *{{quote-news, year=2011, date=October 1, author=Tom Fordyce, work=BBC Sport
    • , title= Rugby World Cup 2011: England 16-12 Scotland , passage=England were ponderous with ball in hand, their runners static when taking the ball and their lines obvious, while their front row struggled badly in the scrum.}}
  • *{{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-28, author=(Joris Luyendijk)
    • , volume=189, issue=3, page=21, magazine=(The Guardian Weekly) , title= Our banks are out of control , passage=Seeing the British establishment struggle with the financial sector is like watching an alcoholic who still resists the idea that something drastic needs to happen for him to turn his life around.}}
  • To strive, or to make efforts, with a twisting, or with contortions of the body.
  • :
  • *
  • *:Orion hit a rabbit once; but though sore wounded it got to the bury, and, struggling in, the arrow caught the side of the hole and was drawn out. Indeed, a nail filed sharp is not of much avail as an arrowhead; you must have it barbed, and that was a little beyond our skill.

    • Usage notes

    * This is a catenative verb that takes the to infinitive . See

    difficult

    English

    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.

    • 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 also

    Derived terms

    * difficultly

    Verb

    (en verb)
  • (obsolete) To make difficult; to impede; to perplex.

    • Statistics

    *

    External links

    * * 1000 English basic words