0 a cause of continuous trouble or unhappiness:
1 something that is particularly effective in causing you trouble or worry:
He believed that empire was "an invaluable antidote to the parochialism that is the bane of domestic politics and the insularity that hampers smaller states".
The lack of accurate locality data for samples is the bane of museum curators' lives.
In other cases, we may be left with fanciful speculation - leopard's bane, goat's rue, toadflax.
To them, prescriptivism as such is not the bane of effective teaching and learning.
We capture here a glimpse of the bane of research synthesis.
There is always a danger with regulations that they become a claimant's bane and a lawyer's paradise.
They are a bane to the people who have to live alongside them.
We have already made it clear that national agreements are the bane of the life of hospital managers.