adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
a painful dilemma (= a very difficult one )
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She faced the painful dilemma of having to decide whether to tell the police about her son's crimes.
a painful divorce (= causing a lot of sadness )
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I have been through a painful divorce, and know what it feels like.
a painful memory (= very upsetting )
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He sobbed as he relived the painful memory.
a painful ordeal (= a very bad or painful experience )
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The treatment she had to go through was a painful ordeal.
a painful/uncomfortable reminder
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This violence is a painful reminder that peace is still a long way away.
difficult/painful
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She has had to make the difficult transition from child actor to adult star.
painful (= one that is very upsetting )
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Her family supported her through the painful experience.
painful (= one that is difficult to deal with )
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Painful emotions, stored away in the patient’s memory, can suddenly come flooding back.
the sad/painful truth (= something that is true but that you regret )
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She still misses him, and that’s the sad truth.
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADVERB
almost
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Coldness flew out at her and it was unnatural, almost painful .
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The desolate quietness was almost painful .
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The servant started toward the company with full and foaming bowl, holding it out before him with almost painful care.
as
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A lot of what follows is as painful as pulling teeth.
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Imagery offers another approach to aversion therapy which is not as painful or invasive as the procedures mentioned above.
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It must surely be much more pleasant and by no means as painful to work with friendly and docile ferrets.
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That thorny subject, if he but knew it, was as painful to her as it was to him.
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How can you conceive of something as painful , as hurting, without conceiving of it as hurting you?
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Surely, in conceiving of something that hurts, you necessarily conceive of it as painful to you.
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It isn't as painful as I thought it would be.
excruciatingly
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They were reconciled in the months before Brynner's excruciatingly painful death from cancer.
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An attacker can be quite literally tied up in an excruciatingly painful arm twist in seconds.
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Unfortunately, half way through it loses the plot and its authenticity and sadly slips into excruciatingly painful white boy reggae mode.
extremely
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That would make it extremely painful to have gone short of sterling in the past few days.
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A sting from one of these results in an extremely painful wound.
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Her left arm was locked to her side, because her shoulder was extremely painful .
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But it is also extremely painful .
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At this stage, the arthritis in his fingers was scarcely bearable and writing extremely painful .
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This was an extremely painful time for the patients.
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Although their bite is extremely painful to man, they are not aggressive and most people are bitten while handling them.
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My eyebrows badly need plucking but I find it extremely painful .
how
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And how painful it's been at times to love you.
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But yes, he was wondering how painful the best might be.
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The deep recession that followed shows how painful true perestroika can be.
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As a physiotherapist, Roebuck knew how painful , demanding and difficult the recovery period and rehabilitating process would be.
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Didn't she realise how painful an accusation of that magnitude was?
less
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The final contractions are less painful and, indeed, pain varies a good deal between women and between births.
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His eye was less painful by now, but his head ached.
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Catheters and endoscopes can be used for safer and less painful investigations.
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Christmas, for Phil Prior and for her young son, was made less painful by the kindness of her neighbours.
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After all this time, Beth had hoped that the memories would be less painful .
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They say it makes the experience less painful for them and less traumatic for the baby.
more
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It was short, to the point, each sentence more painful than the last.
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It was a more complicated and more painful undertaking than Danny Ballow had had to face.
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The transition is even more painful if interest rates happen to be rising at the time.
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It is difficult to imagine a writer giving a character a more painful and courageous sentence.
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It is far more painful and exhausting to suppress our emotions than it is to experience them.
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The whistling became louder, more piercing, more painful .
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I am sure it will be even more painful as the reports come out.
most
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These are just as important and often the most painful types of fear.
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This is one of the most painful days.
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We, by contrast, are at present at the most painful phase of a radical readjustment.
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This day a year ago was the longest of my life, the most painful and sad.
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Such a friend can never help us honestly to confront the most painful aspects of our personalities.
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His refusal to forswear moonshine, however, mocked her with the most painful failure of all.
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I worked in the communities that experienced the most painful impact of the first of the Government's recessions in the 1980s.
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Now the most painful way to call upon the public to sacrifice its claims is by taxing.
often
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For more than two years, he was chairman of the Czechoslovak parliament, overseeing the slow and often painful march to democracy.
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This has presented it with a series of new and often painful problems.
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However, the gestation and birth of new settlements is a tricky and often painful business that needs careful management.
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The novel is a humorous but often painful odyssey through the next three decades of Dolores' life.
particularly
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Usually the problem is quite minor, but anything particularly painful or persistent should always be checked.
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The rift between the two men was particularly painful since they had been so close at first.
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Most physical punishments used by parents are not intended to be, or experienced as, particularly painful .
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Having to be more separate can, for some people, resurrect memories of earlier separations which were particularly painful for them.
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To have hurt feelings is not a particularly painful kind of hurt.
so
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Her head was so painful that she hardly knew what she was seeing, except that there could be no doubt of it.
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In fact, the mere touching of an affected ear can be so painful as to interfere with sleep.
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Reality becomes so painful that the sufferer uses his or her substance or process of addiction in order to survive the emotional carnage.
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I mean, this must be all so painful for you.
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I was becoming so tense that my head, neck and even my eyes were always so painful .
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My ankle was so much swollen... and the bruise was so painful that I could get no rest.
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Why did life have to be so hard? So painful ?
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My feet were sometimes so painful and swollen that I could only walk with my heels out of my shoes.
too
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Our friend Startop agreed to row instead of me, as my hands were still too painful .
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She was so emotionally fragile that being sober was simply too painful .
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Some of the memories were almost too painful to dwell upon.
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The enormity of what I have done, the trouble that I have caused my parents is too painful .
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Too much movement would have been too painful .
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Now she had trouble getting up and walking, gravity too painful for her.
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Just a small one, not too painful .
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Before it became too painful for you?
very
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The lymph nodes are very painful and can take up to ten days to burst and then exude a thick yellow pus.
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For many parents, watching their child in such a situation can be very painful !
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This was very painful , and made me cry aloud.
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The big purple grass burrs were very painful when we stepped on them.
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I kept expecting very painful things to come up: that's what I thought analysis was about.
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It was a terrible fall: humiliating and very painful .
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The glands become matted together and very painful to the touch.
■ NOUN
death
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They were reconciled in the months before Brynner's excruciatingly painful death from cancer.
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They all died slow, brutal, painful deaths .
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He was returned to the Bocardo Jail, from whose roof he watched the painful death by burning of Latimer and Ridley.
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In those cases, the creatures were harpooned and left to die slow, painful deaths .
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An alternative is gassing - again an unpleasant and painful death .
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She had a demonic nature, cursing all her subjects to dreadful sickness and painful deaths .
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He aimed for Benny's stomach - it would be a slower, more painful death that way.
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Given a meatless diet it will rapidly become ill and will then die a painful death .
decision
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I came to a bold and painful decision .
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Another painful decision involved the ongoing tension between Kistiakowsky and Seth Neddermeyer.
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In doing so they would deny Mr Ashdown the opportunity to take his painful decision .
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It is getting people to accept painful decisions without hurting them.
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But at last she came to a painful decision .
emotion
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He stepped back from the microphone and lowered his gaze, lost in painful emotion .
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Recounting the matter in present time-without being returned-the patient is using all the intervening years as buffers against the painful emotion .
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It does not matter whether the engram occurred two hours or ten years ago, painful emotion can be reduced from it.
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Physical pain in the contrasurvival chain can suppress painful emotion in the prosurvival chain.
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The third example of the painful emotion engram is the third type: loss of an ally by reversal.
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You are looking for a painful emotion engram, an instant of loss which will discharge.
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A knowledge of the painful emotion engram; 6.
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The painful emotion engram, however, does a rather smooth rise.
experience
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Breakfast was a painful experience for me.
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As with any painful experience , the parents may be much stronger after they have gone through these reactions together. 15.
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There were times when Rose felt as if she were split in half - an interesting rather than a painful experience .
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It can be a painful experience for viewing loved ones.
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United could have made it an even more painful experience for Bradford manager Paul Jewell.
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Like many, she has her own stock of painful experiences which sometimes affect her present life.
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Although a few had had quick and relatively painless births, many had found it a very painful experience .
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Through marriage he created the possibility of consciously knowing about and coming to terms with his own painful experience of loss.
memory
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He sobbed as he relived the painful memory .
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For many of us, these long winter nights stir up painful memories and fearful thoughts.
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Feeling her stomach churn with the painful memories , she leaned sideways and was violently sick.
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We have to drop the charge and put the painful memories on one side.
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The painful memory of last year's semi-final defeat by Kilkenny acts as another spur.
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But those painful memories are erased by thoughts of future glory as Jodami whisks Anthea across the moorland gallops.
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Maggie suddenly shuddered, and twisted away, her happy expression replaced by one of painful memories .
process
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This is usually a painful process which most authors secretly hate!
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Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab records the painful process of recovery.
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Sadly, though, we have in the past year been through the painful process of shedding a large number of jobs.
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Getting naked was a long and painful process , and involved finding out just how much punishment her body had taken.
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It's a difficult, demanding and, at times, painful process .
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Looking back on it, I think it was only part of the painful process of growing up.
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However, the termination of overdrafts is a painful process .
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He will now begin the physically and mentally painful process of taking male hormones to establish for the first time his masculinity.
reminder
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The ocean carried painful reminders of the hundreds of lives lost.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
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painful shyness
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painful surgery
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painful , swollen knee-joints
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a slow painful death
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Colin's death is painful to me and everyone who knew him.
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events from her painful and troubled past
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For those involved, the scandal has been a very painful experience.
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His total humiliation was painful to watch.
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It's five years since we separated, but I still find the memories quite painful .
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It was so painful to see how frail she had become in just a few months.
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Jim's knee was still painful where he had fallen on it.
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The child suffered painful stomach cramps and vomiting after drinking one of the contaminated drinks.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
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But it can add up to a painful result.
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Each year the painful birth of birds brought more seeds, more bones, more wolves into the forest.
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In her misery, Aileen remembered with painful clarity when she'd first met Mac.
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More painful in many ways is the appalling loss of self-confidence and self-esteem.
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That means food aid, and it means more painful diplomacy in the search for peace.
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The transition from dualism to monism is painful .
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The treatment, in the early stages, could be painful , but it could also bring a release from pain.
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This was very painful , and made me cry aloud.