hard
not easy; requiring great physical or mental effort to accomplish or comprehend or endure
How often you will meet it
Rank 362 of 71,295 words measured. It occurs 55,401 times across 155,139 chapters — 0.026% of every word in the library.
It belongs to the first 500 words, the band worth learning before any other.
What it means
adjective
- not easy; requiring great physical or mental effort to accomplish or comprehend or endure also: difficult a difficult tasknesting places on the cliffs are difficult of access
- dispassionate took a hard looka hard bargainer
- resisting weight or pressure
- very strong or vigorous also: knockout, severe strong windsa hard left to the chin
- characterized by effort to the point of exhaustion; especially physical effort also: arduous, backbreaking, grueling, gruelling, heavy, laborious worked their arduous way up the mining valleya grueling campaign
- produced without vibration of the vocal cords also: unvoiced, voiceless, surd unvoiced consonants such as `p' and `k' and `s'
hard in real books
Each sentence below was written by a published author and is taken from a different book in our library. Open one to read the passage it came from, with narration.
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Four better types of the Blue-grass and of the mountains it would be hard to find.
The Heart of the Hills · John, Jr. Fox · Chapter 1
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Again that throaty, threatening growl, and again the president's hand went up--the boys were hard to hold.
The Courage of the Commonplace · Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews · Chapter 1
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There isn’t one of them that’s not hard up and trying to get money out of her.
The Mysterious Affair at Styles · Agatha Christie · Chapter 1
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Fagging at Harrow--which varies slightly in different houses--is hard or easy according to the taste and fancy of the fag's master.
The Hill: A Romance of Friendship · Horace Annesley Vachell · Chapter 1
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Hamp Biscoe, it appears, was a hard working, thrifty farmer, who lived near England, Arkansas, upon a small farm with his family.
The Red Record Tabulated Statistics · Ida B. Wells-Barnett · Chapter 1