Arduous

WORD OF THE DAY

arduous / adjective / AHR-juh-wus 

Definition

1a : hard to accomplish or achieve 

1b: difficult

1c: marked by great labor or effort 

1d: strenuous

2a: hard to climb 

2b: steep

Examples

Every summer, right before the beginning of the new school year, the football team begins its season with "Hell Week," an arduous six days of conditioning and training.

"The mission has been long and the road arduous for Israeli nonprofit SpaceIL, which has, in some iteration or another, been working on the concept of a lunar lander for nearly a decade." 

— Chabeli Herrera, The Orlando (Florida) Sentinel, 20 Feb. 2019

Did You Know?

"To forgive is the most arduous pitch human nature can arrive at." When Richard Steele published that line in The Guardian in 1713, he was using arduous in what was apparently a fairly new way for English writers in his day: to imply that something was steep or lofty as well as difficult or strenuous. 

Steele's use is one of the earliest documented in English for that meaning, but he didn't commit it to paper until almost 150 years after the first uses of the word in its "strenuous" sense. 

Although the "steep" sense is newer, it is still true to the word's origins; arduous derives from the Latin arduus, which means "high," "steep," or "difficult."