See make hard work of in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
Download JSON data for make hard work of meaning in English (3.3kB)
{
"forms": [
{
"form": "makes hard work of",
"tags": [
"present",
"singular",
"third-person"
]
},
{
"form": "making hard work of",
"tags": [
"participle",
"present"
]
},
{
"form": "made hard work of",
"tags": [
"participle",
"past"
]
},
{
"form": "made hard work of",
"tags": [
"past"
]
}
],
"head_templates": [
{
"args": {
"1": "make<,,made> hard work of"
},
"expansion": "make hard work of (third-person singular simple present makes hard work of, present participle making hard work of, simple past and past participle made hard work of)",
"name": "en-verb"
}
],
"lang": "English",
"lang_code": "en",
"pos": "verb",
"senses": [
{
"categories": [
{
"_dis": "95 5",
"kind": "other",
"name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
"parents": [
"Entries with incorrect language header",
"Entry maintenance"
],
"source": "w+disamb"
}
],
"examples": [
{
"ref": "1895, Wisconsin Farmers' Institutes, A Hand-book of Agriculture, page 196",
"text": "The motion is from the shoulder rather than from the elbow, moving the whole arm, and there is no need to make hard work of it.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "1905, Ad Sense: Devoted to the Interests of Buyers of Advertising, page 582",
"text": "I made hard work of a very easy task .",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "1985, Maurice Taylor, Easy Steps to the Band, page 67",
"text": "Don't make hard work of it . An instrument in good condition is easy to blow when properly played.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2022, Andrew Rippin, The Qur'an and its Interpretative Tradition, page 47",
"text": "Unfortunately, Versteegh made hard work of his task once again by using the rather difficult manuscript from Cairo, Dār al-kutub 242 (Versteegh describes this manuscript on p. 156 as \"very hard to read, and we have managed to analyze only parts of it.\").",
"type": "quotation"
}
],
"glosses": [
"To do (something) in a way that makes it more difficult than it needs to be."
],
"id": "en-make_hard_work_of-en-verb-AbL-LvYC",
"raw_glosses": [
"(idiomatic) To do (something) in a way that makes it more difficult than it needs to be."
],
"synonyms": [
{
"_dis1": "96 4",
"word": "make heavy work of"
}
],
"tags": [
"idiomatic"
]
},
{
"categories": [],
"examples": [
{
"ref": "1891, John Pancoast Gordy, Rise and Growth of the Normal-school Idea in the United States, page 80",
"text": "For arithmetic to-day, as the pupils made hard work of the examples yesterday, I changed only the numbers.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2003, Gordon Banks, Banksy: The Autobiography of an English Football Hero",
"text": "While we had made hard work of defeating Sheffield United in our FA Cup semifinal, Spurs were breezing past Burnley 3–0 in the other tie.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2005, Gene Kerrigan, Hard Cases – True Stories of Irish Crime",
"text": "As Wright opened the door he made hard work of it, rattling the key in the lock.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2020 September 5, Phil McNulty, “Iceland 0-1 England”, in BBC Sport",
"text": "England made hard work of the win against a stubborn and well-organised Iceland but were the better and more positive side.",
"type": "quotation"
}
],
"glosses": [
"To struggle to accomplish something."
],
"id": "en-make_hard_work_of-en-verb-71FEXPef",
"raw_glosses": [
"(idiomatic) To struggle to accomplish something."
],
"tags": [
"idiomatic"
]
}
],
"word": "make hard work of"
}
{
"categories": [
"English entries with incorrect language header",
"English lemmas",
"English multiword terms",
"English verbs"
],
"forms": [
{
"form": "makes hard work of",
"tags": [
"present",
"singular",
"third-person"
]
},
{
"form": "making hard work of",
"tags": [
"participle",
"present"
]
},
{
"form": "made hard work of",
"tags": [
"participle",
"past"
]
},
{
"form": "made hard work of",
"tags": [
"past"
]
}
],
"head_templates": [
{
"args": {
"1": "make<,,made> hard work of"
},
"expansion": "make hard work of (third-person singular simple present makes hard work of, present participle making hard work of, simple past and past participle made hard work of)",
"name": "en-verb"
}
],
"lang": "English",
"lang_code": "en",
"pos": "verb",
"senses": [
{
"categories": [
"English idioms",
"English terms with quotations"
],
"examples": [
{
"ref": "1895, Wisconsin Farmers' Institutes, A Hand-book of Agriculture, page 196",
"text": "The motion is from the shoulder rather than from the elbow, moving the whole arm, and there is no need to make hard work of it.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "1905, Ad Sense: Devoted to the Interests of Buyers of Advertising, page 582",
"text": "I made hard work of a very easy task .",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "1985, Maurice Taylor, Easy Steps to the Band, page 67",
"text": "Don't make hard work of it . An instrument in good condition is easy to blow when properly played.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2022, Andrew Rippin, The Qur'an and its Interpretative Tradition, page 47",
"text": "Unfortunately, Versteegh made hard work of his task once again by using the rather difficult manuscript from Cairo, Dār al-kutub 242 (Versteegh describes this manuscript on p. 156 as \"very hard to read, and we have managed to analyze only parts of it.\").",
"type": "quotation"
}
],
"glosses": [
"To do (something) in a way that makes it more difficult than it needs to be."
],
"raw_glosses": [
"(idiomatic) To do (something) in a way that makes it more difficult than it needs to be."
],
"tags": [
"idiomatic"
]
},
{
"categories": [
"English idioms",
"English terms with quotations"
],
"examples": [
{
"ref": "1891, John Pancoast Gordy, Rise and Growth of the Normal-school Idea in the United States, page 80",
"text": "For arithmetic to-day, as the pupils made hard work of the examples yesterday, I changed only the numbers.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2003, Gordon Banks, Banksy: The Autobiography of an English Football Hero",
"text": "While we had made hard work of defeating Sheffield United in our FA Cup semifinal, Spurs were breezing past Burnley 3–0 in the other tie.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2005, Gene Kerrigan, Hard Cases – True Stories of Irish Crime",
"text": "As Wright opened the door he made hard work of it, rattling the key in the lock.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2020 September 5, Phil McNulty, “Iceland 0-1 England”, in BBC Sport",
"text": "England made hard work of the win against a stubborn and well-organised Iceland but were the better and more positive side.",
"type": "quotation"
}
],
"glosses": [
"To struggle to accomplish something."
],
"raw_glosses": [
"(idiomatic) To struggle to accomplish something."
],
"tags": [
"idiomatic"
]
}
],
"synonyms": [
{
"word": "make heavy work of"
}
],
"word": "make hard work of"
}
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-01 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.