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Tribulation vs Difficult - What's the difference?

tribulation | difficult |

As a proper noun tribulation

is (christianity) a relatively short period of time before the second coming where believers will experience worldwide persecution and be purified and strengthened by it.

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.

tribulation

English

Noun

(en noun)
  • Any adversity; a trying period or event.
  • * 1535 , , Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation , ch. 6:
    • For the blessed apostle himself in his sore tribulation', praying thrice unto God to take it away from him, was answered again by God (in a manner) that he was but a fool in asking that request, but that the help of God's grace in that '''tribulation''' to strengthen him was far better for him than to take that ' tribulation from him.
  • * 1847 , , Omoo , ch. 11:
    • Baltimore's tribulations were indeed sore; there was no peace for him day nor night.
  • * 1944 June 27, , Speech in Chicago, Illinois to the 23rd Republican National Convention:
    • It is youth who must inherit the tribulation , the sorrow and the triumphs that are the aftermath of war.
  • * 2009 Sept. 24, , " Kristina'': A New Musical from the ABBA Guys," ''New York Times (retrieved 12 March 2014):
    • Essentially stoic, passive characters, Kristina and the others triumph by surviving — by outliving their plagues and tribulations .

    External links

    * *

    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