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ficult, or hard to do; hardness; arduousness; -- opposed to easiness or facility; as, the difficulty of a task or enterprise; a work of difficulty. Not being able to promote them [the interests of life] on account of the difficulty of the region. James Byrne.

The quality of being abstruse; difficulty of apprehension. Boyle.

Doing; trouble; difficulty; troublesome business; fuss; bustle; as, to make a great ado about trifles. With much ado, he partly kept awake. Dryden. Let's follow to see the end of this ado. Shak.

se of the mental faculties; exhibiting skill and readiness in avoiding danger or escaping difficulty; ready in invention or execution; -- applied to persons and to acts; as, an adroit mechanic, an adroit reply. "Adroit in the application of the telescope and quadrant." Horsley. "He was adroit in intrigue." Macaulay.…

In an arduous manner; with difficulty or laboriousness.

The quality of being arduous; difficulty of execution.

Sharpness; disagreeableness; difficulty. The acclivities and asperities of duty. Barrow.

To encounter or meet purposely with the view of mastering, as an obstacle, difficulty, or the like. The thorny wilds the woodmen fierce assail. Pope.

A disease, characterized by difficulty of breathing (due to a spasmodic contraction of the bronchi), recurring at intervals, accompanied with a wheezing sound, a sense of constriction in the chest, a cough, and expectoration.

Watchful; vigilant or on one's guard against danger or difficulty.

, and much intersected by canons, and where lack of wood, water, and forage increases the difficulty of traversing the country, whence the name, first given by the Canadian French, Mauvaises Terres (bad lands).

Difficulty of speech.

A state of being obliged to face an antagonist or a difficulty, when escape has become impossible. Embolden'd by despair, he stood at bay. Dryden. The most terrible evils are just kept at bay by incessant efforts. I. Taylor

of other sounds into it, as through inability to distinguish them from b, or because of difficulty in pronouncing them.

To support, hold up, or maintain with difficulty or unusual effort; -- often with up. To bolster baseness. Drayton. Shoddy inventions designed to bolster up a factitious pride. Compton Reade.

A nonmetallic element occurring abundantly in borax. It is reduced with difficulty to the free state, when it can be obtained in several different forms; viz., as a substance of a deep olive color, in a semimetallic form, and in colorless quadratic crystals similar to the diamond in hardness and other properties. It oc…

ion. An after dinner's breath. Shak. Out of breath, breathless, exhausted; breathing with difficulty. -- Under one's breath, in low tones.

Respiration; the act of inhaling and exhaling air. Subject to a difficulty of breathing. Melmoth.

To find a way of getting over, as a difficulty; -- generally with over.

king young John Bull." W. D.Howells. -- To take the bull by the horns, to grapple with a difficulty instead of avoiding it.