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Dictionary

Words, grammatical forms and meanings linked to the ontology.

hardscrabble en · ADJ

Pronunciation

  • /ˈhɑɹdˌskɹæbəl/ (US)
  • (US) audio

Etymology

From hard + scrabble.

Meanings

  1. (Canada, US, not-comparable, of land) Requiring much work to farm, and ultimately not very productive.
    • In the case of Allegheny Briskow, poverty, the drought, the grinding hardships of these hard-scrabble Texas counties, had dwarfed the intellect, the very soul of a splendid young animal. 1922, Rex Ellingwood Beach, chapter V, in Flowing Gold:
    • Villages in the more remote and hard-scrabble regions, including some mountain areas, are being abandoned, and nature is starting to creep back. 2018, Tim Flannery, Europe: A Natural History, page 286:
    • his hardscrabble peanut farm
  2. (Canada, US, broadly, not-comparable) Involving hard work and struggle.
    • Being the savage’s bowsman, that is, the person who pulled the bow-oar in his boat (the second one from forward), it was my cheerful duty to attend upon him while taking that hard-scrabble scramble upon the dead whale’s back. 1851 November 14, Herman Melville, chapter 72, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC:
    • He leads a hardscrabble existence.
    • While Rose tried to keep up with Westbrook, the Knicks’ Carmelo Anthony struggled mightily, going 4 of 19 for 18 hardscrabble points. 2016 November 28, Mike Vorkunov, “Despite Flash of Rose’s Prime, Knicks Are Dazed by Westbrook and Thunder”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 08 Nov 2020:
    • Grace and her twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) lost their mother during birth, and their alcoholic father during their hardscrabble childhood. 2024 October 23, Jacob Oller, “Clay weepy Memoir Of A Snail crawls through a gauntlet of misery”, in AV Club, archived from the original on 23 Oct 2024:

Forms

SpellingFeaturesLabelsSource
hard-scrabble alternative lexicographic

Translations (4)

fi vaivalloinen (involving hard work and struggle) · de mühselig (involving hard work and struggle) · ca ardu (involving hard work and struggle) · de entbehrungsreich (involving hard work and struggle)