Difficulty

How to spell difficulty

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce difficulty

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does difficulty mean?

1. nounThe state or quality of being hard to do, deal with, or understand; a problem or obstacle.

Difficulty in a sentence

• The new recruits had great difficulty following the assembly instructions.

• We ran into a technical difficulty while migrating the database.

Where does difficulty come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin difficultas, meaning 'hardship' or 'trouble', which was built directly on the adjective difficilis, 'hard to do'. That adjective was itself formed from dis-, a negating prefix meaning 'not', joined to facilis, 'easy', so the literal sense was simply 'not easy'. The same facilis root, drawn from facere 'to do or make', still surfaces in everyday relatives such as 'facile', 'facility', and 'faculty'. English took the word in during the late 1300s, partly through Old French difficulté, and the spelling has kept the doubled consonant and the unstressed middle vowels of its Latin parent. Knowing that it began as dis- plus facilis explains the single f after the prefix and the otherwise puzzling -cul- in the middle.

How the word is built

• dif- (variant of dis-, meaning 'not')
• facil (from facilis, 'easy')
• -ty (noun-forming suffix)