Etimology
From Middle English difficult (ca. 1400), a back-formation from difficultee (whence modern difficulty), from Old French difficulté, from Latin difficultas, from difficul, older form of difficilis (“hard to do, difficult”), from dis- + facilis (“easy”); see difficile. Replaced native Middle English earveþ (“difficult, hard”), from Old English earfoþe (“difficult, laborious, full of hardship”), cognate to German Arbeit (“work”).
adjective
difficult (comparative more difficult, superlative most difficult)
Hard, not easy, requiring much effort.
(often of a person, or a horse, etc) Hard to manage, uncooperative, troublesome.
(obsolete) Unable or unwilling.
Examples
However, the difficult weather conditions will ensure Yunnan has plenty of freshwater.
There is not the strength or courage left me to venture into the wide, strange, 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.
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 , is a tangle too. […] But as a foundation for analysis it is highly subjective: it rests on difficult decisions about what counts as a territory, what counts as output and how to value it. Indeed, economists are still tweaking it.
Stop being difficult and eat your broccoli—you know it's good for you.
“I hope, madam,” said Jones, “my charming Lady Bellaston will be as difficult to believe anything against one who is so sensible of the many obligations she hath conferred upon him.”
Related words
synonyms
burdensome, cumbersome, hard
see also Thesaurus:difficult
verb
difficult (third-person singular simple present difficults, present participle difficulting, simple past and past participle difficulted)
(obsolete, transitive) To make difficult; to impede; to perplex.
Examples
their Excellencies having desisted from their pretensions , which had difficulted the peace