Meaning & use
hardship
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Meanings
nouncountable or uncountable
A situation or period of serious difficulty, especially from lack of money or basic comfort.
Grammar: Uncountable for general suffering, countable for specific hardships.
Patterns
- suffer hardship
- endure hardships
- cause hardship to someone
The family endured years of hardship after the factory closed.
Many hardships followed the flood.
The new tax caused hardship for low-income families.
nouncountable
A particular difficult condition or event that someone must bear.
Grammar: Countable: face a hardship.
Patterns
- a hardship for someone
Walking miles to school was a daily hardship.
Long separation was the biggest hardship of the job.
He never complained about any hardship.
Word forms
| plural | hardships |
|---|
Common combinations
- economic hardship
- Many suffered economic hardship.
- financial hardship
- She applied for help in financial hardship.
- endure hardship
- Pioneers endured great hardship.
- cause hardship
- The closure will cause hardship.
- face hardship
- The family faced hardship.
Synonyms and how they differ
- adversity
- Adversity is more formal and refers to difficult circumstances in general.
- suffering
- Suffering stresses pain, not lack of resources.
- privation
- Privation is a formal word for lack of necessities.
- difficulty
- Difficulty is milder and common.
Opposites
Word family
Commonly confused: hardship or hardship vs hardiness?
hardship vs hardship vs hardiness
Hardiness is the ability to endure difficulty; hardship is the difficulty itself.
Practice
After losing his job, the family faced serious financial ____.
Choose one answer.
Hardship is severe difficulty. Hardiness is toughness, hardware is equipment and hardening is making something firm.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “hardship”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.