Also found in: Thesaurus.


1. Demanding great effort or labor; difficult: "the arduous work of preparing a Dictionary of the English Language" (Thomas Macaulay).
2. Testing severely the powers of endurance; strenuous: a long, arduous, and exhausting war.
3. Hard to traverse, climb, or surmount.

[From Latin arduus, high, steep.]

ar′du·ous·ly adv.
ar′du·ous·ness n.
ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:
Noun1.arduousness - extreme effortfulnessarduousness - extreme effortfulness    
effortfulness - the quality of requiring deliberate effort
مَشَقَّة، إرهاق


[ˈɑːdjʊəsnɪs] N [of work, task] → lo arduo; [of climb, journey] → lo arduo, lo penoso; [of conditions] → lo riguroso, lo duro


nBeschwerlichkeit f; (of task)Mühseligkeit f; because of the arduousness of the workweil die Arbeit so anstrengend war/ist


[ˈɑːdjʊəsnɪs] ndifficoltà f inv
Collins Italian Dictionary 1st Edition © HarperCollins Publishers 1995


(ˈaːdjuəs) , ((American) -dʒu-) adjective
difficult; needing hard work. an arduous task.
ˈarduously adverb
ˈarduousness noun
Kernerman English Multilingual Dictionary © 2006-2013 K Dictionaries Ltd.
References in classic literature ?
The generosity of Roderick Anthony--the son of the poet- -affected the ex-financier de Barral in a manner which must have brought home to Flora de Barral the extreme arduousness of the business of being a woman.
If Aquaman appears to be a repetitively arduous film, another film demonstrates a different kind of arduousness. The film is titled Three Words to Forever.
Attempts have been made a couple of times before, but they eventually shut down due to lack of match funding and the arduousness of the application process.
The Hindi film 'Newton', India's now out of the awards race official entry to the much famed Oscars this year, did tell of this arduousness of Indian elections graphically well.
Greed can bring unhappiness because it can take the form of the worry about keeping money, the arduousness of breaking up with it, the inconvenience felt when giving it to other, the desire to acquire new goods and to have as many as possible, and the sorrow after the lost goods (Saint Maximus the Confessor 1982, 50).
"The minimum wages will vary from place to place depending upon skill required, arduousness of the work assigned and geographical location," the Labour Ministry said in a release.
This attitude toward the challenges of study was in contrast to Stairway students who saw the arduousness of study as related to the course itself.
For Nietzsche, the sign of decadence is "that life no longer dwells in the whole." Its fruits are a loss of vital, animating spirit, a constriction of the "exuberance of life into the smallest forms." "Everywhere paralysis, arduousness, torpidity, or hostility and chaos: both more obvious the higher one ascends in forms of organization.
According to Insana, her volume, "sees in translation a signpost for Levi's reflection on language, on language in the camps and within the project of the Final Solution, on the challenges of testimony, and on the transmissive process, revealing the essential difficulty of translation and thus the challenges of survival-testimonial writing: the utter arduousness of the testimonial task" (11).
"(T)here is injustice in the distribution when the inequality of goods reflects not such things as differences in the arduousness of different people's labors, or people's different preferences and choices with respect to income and leisure, but myriad forms of lucky und unlucky circumstance" (23).