What does "painful" mean?
Painful: Requiring labor or toil; difficult; executed with laborious effort; as a painful service; a painful march.
Additional senses
- 2.Painstaking; careful; industrious. [Obs.] Fuller. A very painful person, and a great clerk. Jer. Taylor. Nor must the painful husbandman be tired. Dryden. -- Pain"ful*ly, adv. -- Pain"ful*ness, n.
Sources
- Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913 edition (public domain, via GCIDE / Project Gutenberg).
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- Published: 2026-07-17T00:00:00-07:00 · Modified: 2026-07-17T00:00:00-07:00