{
  "id": "hard.difficulty",
  "term": "hard",
  "sense": "difficulty",
  "pos": "adjective",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 13,
  "arena": "lexicon",
  "domain": "hard.difficulty",
  "style": null,
  "definition": "a state of a substance that does not change when work is done",
  "folk_gloss": null,
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "substance.material",
      "work.effort",
      "state.condition"
    ],
    "interaction": "When work is applied to a substance, its internal pattern resists alteration, creating a firm state.",
    "novel_properties": [
      "resistance to deformation",
      "firmness",
      "difficulty to change"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "The Hoover Dam's concrete core resists cracking under decades of water pressure and temperature swings.",
      "domain": "engineering"
    },
    {
      "text": "Diamond anvils in high-pressure experiments maintain structural integrity at 300 gigapascals.",
      "domain": "physics"
    },
    {
      "text": "The U.S. Social Security Administration's mainframe systems process payments without failure since 1973.",
      "domain": "institutions"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "state.condition",
      "type": "is-a",
      "note": "hard is a kind of condition"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [
    "rock.material",
    "trap.undesirable"
  ],
  "forms": [
    "hard",
    "harder",
    "hardest"
  ],
  "closed": true,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "openrouter:openai/gpt-oss-120b",
    "date": "2026-07-29",
    "confidence": 0.6
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-hard.difficulty"
}