- onerous
- onerous, burdensome, oppressive, exacting are comparable when they mean imposing severe trouble, labor, or hardships. All of these terms are applicable to a state of life, its duties or obligations, or to conditions imposed upon a person by that life or by another person; oppressive and exacting are applicable also to persons or agents responsible for these difficulties.Onerous stresses laboriousness and heaviness but often also implies irksomeness or dis- tastefulness{
the tyranny of a majority might be more onerous than that of a despot— Whitehead
}{"What were the conditions?" "Oh, they were not onerous: just to sit at the head of his table now and then"— Wharton
}Burdensome usually implies mental as well as physical strain and often emphasizes the former{a burdensome tax
}{burdensome Government regulations which are a nuisance to everyone— Roosevelt
}{the burdensome and invidious job of a formal application to the Board of Trade— Economist
}Oppressive adds to burdensome the implication of extreme harshness or severity; it therefore usually connotes the unendurableness of what is imposed or inflicted, whether by nature or circumstances or by man, or cruelty or tyranny in the one responsible for the impositions or inflictions{oppressive heat
}{oppressive rulers
}{there are more ways of coercing a man than by pointing a gun at his head. A pacifist society may be unjust and oppressive— Inge
}{the women are . . . kind and they mean very well, but sometimes they get very oppressive— Cheever
}Exacting, like oppressive, implies severity of demands, but otherwise it differs because it commonly suggests rigor, sternness, or extreme fastidiousness rather than tyranny in the one who demands, or the tremendous care or pains required of the one who satisfies these demands{an exacting technique
}{an exacting employer
}{the exacting life of the sea has this advantage over the life of the earth, that its claims are simple and cannot be evaded— Conrad
}{the pity of it was that even the least exacting husband should so often desire something more piquant than goodness— Glasgow
}
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.
