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''onerous'' ▫ᴱᴺ Entries

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''onerous'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260124114812-00-⌔

onerous - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Adjective

onerous (comparative more onerous, superlative most onerous)

  • Imposing or constituting a physical, mental, or figurative load which can be borne only with effort; burdensome.
    • ✤ Synonyms: burdensome, demanding, difficult, taxing, wearing
    • ✤ That all this might not be too onerous on the purses of his rustic patrons, who are apt to consider the costs of schooling a grievous burden, and schoolmasters as mere drones, he had various ways of rendering himself both useful and agreeable.1
    • ✤ Again, and more intensely than ever, she desired a fixed occupation,—no matter how onerous, how irksome.2
    • ✤ [I]t has become an onerous duty, a wearisome and distasteful task.3
    • ✤ The striker’s job was onerous, too, because there was so little “give” in the metal, and the perpetual jarring was indeed trying to the muscles.4
    • ✤ However, given current sensibilities about individual privacy and data protection, the recording of oral data is becoming increasingly onerous for researchers[.]5
    • ✤ People with diabetes mellitus rely predominantly on finger pricking to measure blood levels of glucose, which can be onerous.6

Etymology

Inherited from Middle English onerous, borrowed from Middle French onereux, from Old French onereus, a learned borrowing from Latin onerosus, from onus (“burden”) + -ōsus. Compare exonerate.

Pronunciation

  • (UK) IPA: /ˈɒnəɹəs/, /ˈəʊnəɹəs/
  • Audio (Southern England): 🔊
  • Audio (Southern England): 🔊
  • (US) IPA: /ˈɑnəɹəs/, /ˈoʊnəɹəs/

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

  1. 1820, Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: ↩

  2. 1849, Currer Bell [pseudonym; Charlotte Brontë], “Further Communications on Business”, in Shirley. A Tale. […], volume II, London: Smith, Elder and Co., […], →OCLC, page 45: ↩

  3. 1910, Jack London, “The Golden Poppy”, in Revolution and Other Essays: ↩

  4. 1945 January and February, A Former Pupil, “Some Memories of Crewe Works—III”, in Railway Magazine, page 13: ↩

  5. 2019, Li Huang, James Lambert, “Another Arrow for the Quiver: A New Methodology for Multilingual Researchers”, in Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, →DOI, page 11: ↩

  6. 2024 June, “A novel system for non-invasive measurement of blood levels of glucose”, in Nature Reviews Endocrinology, volume 20, →DOI, page 320: ↩

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Secondary

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