Other forms: difficulties
Difficulty is how hard something is — and, in the plural, the hard things themselves. The difficulty of the exam, difficulty breathing after four flights of stairs, a company in financial difficulties.
The grammar catches people out: you have difficulty doing something, not to do it — I have difficulty sleeping when it is hot. With difficulty means only just, as in he stood up with difficulty. In difficulty means in trouble, said of swimmers and of businesses, and to run into difficulties is to hit problems partway through. Difficulty is uncountable when it means the quality (the difficulty of the climb) and countable when it means a particular problem (the difficulties began in March). The adjective is difficult, and it covers hard tasks and hard people alike: a difficult child is not a puzzle, just hard work.
1noundifficultyThe quality of being hard to do or understand.
“The difficulty of the questions increases through the paper.”
2nounproblemA problem or an obstacle.
“We ran into difficulties on the second day.”
3nountroubleTrouble, especially money trouble.
“The shop has been in difficulty since the spring.”
Difficulty is Latin saying not easy out loud: difficilis is dis-, 'not', fastened to facilis, 'easy'. The noun difficultas came into English through Anglo-Norman as difficulte. The odd part is the order — the adjective difficult arrived afterwards, cut back out of the noun.
Latin
difficultas
Anglo-Norman
difficulte
Middle English
difficulte
English, today
difficulty
Built from
From Middle English difficulte, from Middle French - and Anglo-Norman difficulte and their etymon Latin difficultas, from difficul, older form of difficilis (“hard to do, difficult”), from dis- + facilis (“easy”); see difficile and difficult. Equivalent to dis- + facile + -ty. Also analysable as difficult + -y, though the adjective is historically a backformation from the noun.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA