Difficult vs Tricky - What's the difference?
difficult | tricky |
As adjectives the difference between difficult and tricky is that difficult is hard, not easy, requiring much effort while tricky is hard to deal with, complicated. As a verb difficult is (obsolete|transitive) to make difficult; to impede; to perplex.
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.
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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.
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Statistics
*
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tricky English
Adjective
( er)
hard to deal with, complicated
- They were in a tricky situation.
* {{quote-news
, year=2012
, date=September 15
, author=Amy Lawrence
, title=Arsenal's Gervinho enjoys the joy of six against lowly Southampton
, work=the Guardian
citation
, page=
, passage=It was as comfortable an afternoon as Arsène Wenger could have wished for in a situation that can be tricky in between internationals and the upcoming Champions League. }}
adept at using deception
- A tricky salesman can sell anything.
Related terms
* trick
See also
* sneaky
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