rough sledding

1. 1.

   a difficulty that can be overcome with effort

   “we had a hard time getting here”

   “analysts predicted rough sledding for handset makers”

   Synonymshard time

   Broaderdifficulty

Questions about rough sledding

What does rough sledding mean?

rough sledding means "a difficulty that can be overcome with effort".

What is another word for rough sledding?

Close synonyms include hard time. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is rough sledding a common word?

rough sledding is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.