horse pill
- noun
- Informal
:
pastilla difícil de tragar
- The new regulations are a horse pill for many employees to swallow.
Examples
-
The cancellation of the event was a horse pill for the organizers.
-
Losing in the finals was a horse pill for the team after months of hard work.
-
That's a tough horse pill to swallow!
-
Taking that horse pill was hard to swallow!
-
Losing in the finals was a horse pill for the team after months of hard work.
-
The cancellation of the event was a horse pill for the organizers.
-
The new regulations are a horse pill for many employees to swallow.
Synonyms
68
8.1
A bad experience you must accept after you do something wrong
52
7.9
A difficult fact or situation that you must accept
2
6.8
An unpleasant fact or event that is hard to accept
Antonyms
How Difficult
- Informal
2
6.8
- Informal
107
4.3
Surface Forms
Morphology
horse + pill
The meaning is partially derivable: 'pill' already has a metaphorical sense of an unpleasant thing to accept (as in 'a hard pill to swallow'), and 'horse' suggests something very large or extreme, so together they imply something especially difficult to accept. However, the specific collocation 'horse pill' is an intensified, somewhat creative extension rather than a fully predictable compositional pattern, so a B1 learner who knows the words may not automatically infer this exact idiomatic use.
Etymology
The noun horse pill comes from the image of a very large tablet given to a horse, a pill so big it is hard to swallow. So when people call something a horse pill, they mean it is 'difficult to accept' or 'hard to deal with'.