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Not easy; painful. [Obs.]

To make less severe, intense, harsh, rigorous, painful, etc.; to soften; to meliorate; to alleviate; to diminish; to lessen; as, to mitigate heat or cold; to mitigate grief.

e act of mitigating, or the state of being mitigated; abatement or diminution of anything painful, harsh, severe, afflictive, or calamitous; as, the mitigation of pain, grief, rigor, severity, punishment, or penalty.

To soil one's self with severe labor; to work with painful effort; to labor; to toil; to drudge. Moil not too much under ground. Bacon. Now he must moil and drudge for one he loathes. Dryden.

Very painful or tedious; wearisome; as, a sermon lasting two mortal hours. [Colloq.] Sir W. Scott. Mortal foe, Mortal enemy, an inveterate, desperate, or implacable enemy; a foe bent on one's destruction.

Subjection of the passions and appetites, by penance, absistence, or painful severities inflicted on the body. The mortification of our lusts has something in it that is troublesome, yet nothing that is unreasonable. Tillotson.

Biting; pinching; painful; destructive; as, a nipping frost; a nipping wind.

Any severe trial, or test; a painful experience. Ordeal bean. (Bot.) See Calabar bean, under Calabar. -- Ordeal root (Bot.) the root of a species of Strychnos growing in West Africa, used, like the ordeal bean, in trials for witchcraft. -- Ordeal tree (Bot.), a poisonous tree of Madagascar (Tanghinia, or Cerbera, ven…

Causing pain; painful. [Obs.] The manacles of Astyages were not . . . the less weighty and painable for being composed of gold or silver. Evelyn.

in, including absence of sensibility to pain, excessive sensibility to pain, and abnormal painful results of stimuli. -- Par`al*ge"sic (#), a.

A painful affection of the side, simulating pleurisy, usually due to rheumatism.

o fix the attention; to be absorbed; -- often with on or upon, and now usually with over."Painfully to pore upon a book." Shak. The eye grows weary with poring perpetually on the same thing. Dryden.

minence in honor. The preëminence of Christianity to any other religious scheme. Addison. Painful preëminence! yourself to view Above life's weakness, and its comforts too. Pope. Beneath the forehead's walled preëminence. Lowell.

Sharply painful; penetrating; poignant; severe; caustic; stinging. With pungent pains on every side. Swift. His pungent pen played its part in rousing the nation. J. R. Green.

r parts adjacent, especially of the fauces or tonsils, attended by considerable swelling, painful and impeded deglutition, and accompanied by inflammatory fever. It sometimes creates danger of suffocation; -- called also squinancy, and squinzey.

A painful affection of the spine; especially, Pott's disease; also, formerly, lead colic.

Growing raw, sore, or painful again.

mind; a statement or narration of remembered experience; a recollection; as, pleasing or painful reminiscences.

A general disease characterized by painful, often multiple, local inflammations, usually affecting the joints and muscles, but also extending sometimes to the deeper organs, as the heart. Inflammatory rheumatism (Med.), acute rheumatism attended with fever, and attacking usually the larger joints, which become swollen,…

ourse of the branches of the sciatic nerve. The name is also popularly applied to various painful affections of the hip and the parts adjoininhg. See Ischiadic passion, under Ischiadic.