Definition
adjSolid and firm., Resistant to pressure; difficult to break, cut, or penetrate.
Sentence Examples
Life is hard, but I am harder.
You work as hard as he did at your age.
Tom is not alone in finding Rick hard to work with.
Word Origin & History
From Middle English hard, from Old English heard, from Proto-West Germanic *hard(ī), from Proto-Germanic *harduz, from Proto-Indo-European *kort-ús, from *kret- (“strong, powerful”).
Cognates
Cognate with Yola hard (“hard”), West Frisian hurd (“hard”), Alemannic German hert (“hard”), Bavarian hoat (“hard”), Central Franconian haat (“hard”), Dutch hard (“hard”), German hart (“hard”), Luxembourgish haart (“hard”), Danish and Swedish hård (“hard”), Faroese and Icelandic harður (“hard”), Norwegian Bokmål hard (“hard”), Norwegian Nynorsk hard, hard’u (“hard”), Gothic 𐌷𐌰𐍂𐌳𐌿𐍃 (hardus, “hard”), Ancient Greek κρατύς (kratús, “strong, mighty”), Sanskrit क्रतु (krátu, “power, might, ability”), Avestan 𐬑𐬭𐬀𐬙𐬎 (xratu).
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"Luckily she wasn’t there any more, no one was, when he returned from the Caribbean carnival damp-hatted and soaked through after being caught unprepared by a squall of hard, hot rain."
— 2001, Salman Rushdie, Fury: A Novel, London: Jonathan Cape, →ISBN, page 5:
"Stunned, she deleted his number and went home. Then she cracked a hard seltzer, opened her phone’s camera and filmed a TikTok video recounting the evening […]."
— 2023 March 1, Rachel Ellison, “Bad Dates Turn Out to Be Excellent on TikTok”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 02 Mar 2023:
"Ray found it hard to imagine having accumulated so many mannerisms before the dawn of sex, of the sexual need to please, of the staginess sex encourages or the tightly capped wells of poisoned sexual desire the disappointed must stand guard over."
— 1988, Edmund White, An Oracle:
"The stone circle is small and hard to find and the search is made harder because all down the beck cars are parked on the verge and the supposedly unfrequented road up the valley very busy."
— 1999 January 21, Alan Bennett, “What I did in 1998”, in London Review of Books, volume 21, number 2:
"The San Juan market is Mexico City's most famous deli of exotic meats, where an adventurous shopper can hunt down hard-to-find critters such as ostrich, wild boar and crocodile."
— 2013 July 26, Nick Miroff, “Mexico gets a taste for eating insects …”, in The Guardian Weekly, volume 189, number 7, page 32: