difficult

adj

1. Hard, not easy, requiring much effort.

   “difficult of accomplishment”

   “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 (GDP), 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.”

2. (often)Hard to manage, uncooperative, troublesome.

   “Stop being difficult and eat your broccoli—you know it's good for you.”

3. (obsolete)Unable or unwilling.

   ““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.””

verb

1. (obsolete, transitive)To make difficult, hinder; to impede; to perplex.

   “August 9 1678, William Temple, letter to Joseph Williamson their Excellencies having desisted from their pretensions , which had difficulted the peace”