ef·fort

(ĕf′ərt)

1. The use of physical or mental energy to do something; exertion.

2. A difficult exertion of strength or will: It was an effort to get up.

3. A usually earnest attempt: Make an effort to arrive promptly.

4. Something done or produced through exertion; an achievement: a play that was his finest effort.

5. Physics

a. Force applied against inertia.

b. The force needed by a machine to accomplish work on a load.

[Middle English, from Old French esfort, from esforcier, to force, exert, from Medieval Latin exfortiāre : Latin ex-, ex- + Latin fortis, strong; see bhergh- in Indo-European roots.]

ef′fort·ful adj.

ef′fort·ful·ly adv.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

effortfully

(ˈɛfətfʊlɪ)

adv

in an effortful manner

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

References in periodicals archive

If you hear the term "pink elephant," you picture a pink elephant for a split second before you "effortfully engage in disbelieving" it.

Do you think like Sherlock Holmes or Dr. Watson?

"I was" sometimes works as well as "It was," but again we sense an author effortfully making his way between episodes or, more accurately, making a between where before there was not one.

Writing underground: Ralph Ellison and the Novel

Asking questions can change choice behavior: Does it do so automatically or effortfully? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 6(3), 195-206.

Self-prophecies and cognitive dissonance: habit, norms and justification of past behavior

Instead, the person can effortfully seek out additional individuating information and integrate it into a coherent impression." (citation omitted)); Marilynn B.

Systemic triage: implicit racial bias in the criminal courtroom

Nonetheless, if we accept as valuable any illuminating new reading that can be generated, whether or not it could ever have been produced by any other scholar, then these articles do work effortfully and at length to make new understandings available.

What we do matters: motives of research in Canadian literature scholarship

Although a discussion of this theoretical position is beyond the scope of this article, its relevance for a discussion of the spatiality of writing and spatial theory is worth mentioning, and suggestively hinted at by philosopher Andy Clark (2005) in his call to "take very seriously the material reality of language: its existence as an additional, actively created and effortfully maintained structure in our internal and external environment." (p.

Ambient text and the becoming space of writing