PAINFUL • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Painful

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/pˈeɪnfəl/ Listen

adjective

Painful adj.

Full of pain; causing uneasiness or distress, either physical or mental; afflictive; disquieting; distressing.

Requiring labor or toil; difficult; executed with laborious effort; as a painful service; a painful march.

Painstaking; careful; industrious. (Obs.) "A very painful person, and a great clerk." "Nor must the painful husbandman be tired."

Synonyms: Disquieting; troublesome; afflictive; distressing; grievous; laborious; toilsome; difficult; arduous.

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Etymology of 'Painful'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Painful" Quotes from Famous Books

... too painful. The grotesqueness of her father's complacency humiliated her past bearing. She was humiliated, not for herself, but for him. Singular creature! She ran out of ...

— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett

... opportunity. He lives at one of the royal hunting-lodges, which can be reached from here in an hour and a half by walking, and which he obtained leave to inhabit after the loss of his wife, as it is so painful to him to reside in ...

— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe

... now in Europe, was almost brutal in his determination to purchase the property," she stated with painful repression. "The present Mrs. Slosher is a pretty doll, and he is childishly infatuated with her; but his millions can not ...

— Five Thousand an Hour - How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress • George Randolph Chester

... effect, he fell down dead. Sir Bartle Frere, in his obituary notice of Livingstone read to the Royal Geographical Society, remarked: "For thirty years afterward all his labors and adventures, entailing such exertion and fatigue, were undertaken with a limb so maimed that it was painful for him to raise a fowling-piece, or in fact to place the left arm in any position above the level of ...

— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie

... servant to the Spanish king than return; and the rest were much mistaken, who would have persuaded that I was too easeful and sensual to undertake a journey of so great travail. But if what I have done receive the gracious construction of a painful pilgrimage, and purchase the least remission, I shall think all too little, and that there were wanting to the rest many miseries. But if both the times past, the present, and what may be in the future, do all by one grain of gall ...

— The Discovery of Guiana • Sir Walter Raleigh

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