heavy going
Idioms-
Also, heavy weather.
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Difficult, as in Tom found calculus heavy going , or It's going to be heavy weather for us from here on . The first expression originally referred to a road or path that was hard to negotiate; the variant alludes to bad weather at sea. [Mid-1800s]
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make heavy weather of . Make hard work or a fuss over something, especially unnecessarily. For example, They made heavy weather of the differences between their proposals, which actually seemed much alike . This use of weather likens a commotion to a storm. [Mid-1900s]
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Walking across his arable farm near Malmesbury is heavy going.
From BBC • Apr. 11, 2024
Lewis’ prose can be heavy going, but the action flows effortlessly in DiPietro’s play.
From Los Angeles Times • Dec. 5, 2023
Some of the material in “The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails” is relatively heavy going.
From New York Times • Dec. 13, 2021
The concerts were heavy going at times, but Kopatchinskaja invested them with vital purpose.
From The New Yorker • Jun. 25, 2018
It made for heavy going and they had to shovel their way in places with a plank they carried in the lower rack of the cart.
From "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
