Definition
nounA contortion of the body in an attempt to escape or to perform a difficult task.
nounStrife, contention, great effort.
Sentence Examples
That fight seemed like a life-or-death struggle.
Even today, however, women struggle against discrimination.
Marx wrote about the class struggle.
Word Origin & History
From Middle English struglen, stroglen, strogelen, of obscure origin. Cognate with Scots strugil (“to struggle, grapple, contend”). Perhaps from a variant of *strokelen, *stroukelen (> English stroll), from Middle Dutch struyckelen ("to stumble, trip, falter"; > Modern Dutch struikelen), the frequentative form of Old Dutch *strūkon (“to stumble”), from Proto-Germanic *strūkōną, *strūkēną (“to be stiff”), from Proto-Indo-European *strug-, *ster- (“to be stiff; to bristle, strut, stumble, fall”), related to Middle Low German strûkelen ("to stumble"; > Low German strükeln), Old High German strūhhēn, strūhhōn ("to stumble, trip, tumble, go astray"; > German strauchen, straucheln).
Alternative etymology derives the base of struggle from Old Norse strúgr (“arrogance, pride, spitefulness, ill-will”) + -le (frequentative suffix), from Proto-Germanic *strūkaz (“stiff, rigid”), ultimately from the same Proto-Indo-European root above, which would make it cognate with dialectal Swedish strug (“contention, strife, discord”), Norwegian stru (“obstinate, unruly”), Danish struende (“reluctantly”), Scots strug (“difficulty, perplexity, a laborious task”).
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"The struggle with ways and means had recommenced, more difficult now a hundredfold than it had been before, because of their increasing needs. Their income disappeared as a little rivulet that is swallowed by the thirsty ground. He worked night and day to supplement it."
— 1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter XXIII, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC:
"R. Moskowitz charges cisgender readers to be as conscious and deliberate with our religious identities as transgender and gender non-conforming people are with theirs, arguing that holiness is only achieved through continuous and unrelenting struggle and change."
— 2019, Rachel Timoner, “Book Review: Textual Activism by Rabbi Mike Moskowitz”, in Tikkun:
"Troutbeck is a tiny village midway between Penrith and Keswick in a very sparsely populated part of Cumberland, and it used to be said by facetious travellers that the reason why it ever had a station at all was to give the engine a rest after it had struggled up the long and trying incline from Threlkeld."
— 1951 October, “Notes and News: The Harmonium at Troutbeck”, in Railway Magazine, page 709:
"England were ponderous with ball in hand, their runners static when taking the ball and their lines obvious, while their front row struggled badly in the scrum."
— 2011 October 1, Tom Fordyce, “Rugby World Cup 2011: England 16-12 Scotland”, in BBC Sport:
"Seeing the British establishment struggle with the financial sector is like watching an alcoholic who still resists the idea that something drastic needs to happen for him to turn his life around."
— 2013 June 28, Joris Luyendijk, “Our banks are out of control”, in The Guardian Weekly, volume 189, number 3, page 21: