hard pill to swallow

Example: “Losing to their smallest rival was a hard pill to swallow.”

Origin: Depends on what pills were actually like before modern pharmacy. A pill was a rolled mass of medicine — aloes, bitter herbs, mercury compounds — with no coating of any kind, frequently large, reliably unpleasant, and genuinely difficult to force down; taking one was a small ordeal endured only because the alternative was worse. That made it an obvious figure for a fact or an outcome someone has to accept while finding it thoroughly disagreeable, and the comparison was already doing figurative work in English by the 1500s. The sugar coating that makes modern tablets easy to take was a nineteenth-century innovation, and it spun off an idiom of its own — sugarcoating the pill — for softening bad news rather than delivering it plain.