Word.ws English Dictionary

battle-hardened

battle-hardened adjective: unfeeling or lacking emotion due to experience in battle; callous.

Adjective

battle-hardened (comparative more battle-hardened, superlative most battle-hardened)

  1. (figuratively, literally) Unfeeling or lacking emotion due to experience in battle; callous.
    • Andy Lord has been at TfL for three years. He joined as managing director of London Underground in 2019, and subsequently became chief operating officer. But he was already battle-hardened by seven years as operations director for British Airways - the longest tenure of anyone in that similarly...2022 December 28, Andy Lord tells Paul Clifton, “We are much stronger if we work together”, in RAIL, number 973, page 46
    • After more than a year of war, Ukraine is battle hardened.2023 April 3, Andrew E. Kramer, Mauricio Lima, “New Weapons Aren’t Enough: The Challenges of Ukraine’s Coming Assault”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

Forms of battle-hardened

comparativemore battle-hardened
superlativemost battle-hardened

Questions about battle-hardened

What does battle-hardened mean?
Battle-hardened means unfeeling or lacking emotion due to experience in battle; callous.
What part of speech is battle-hardened?
Battle-hardened is an adjective.

Words near battle-hardened in the dictionary

  1. battle-damaged
  2. battle-field
  3. battle-fields
  4. battle-ground
  5. battle-grounds
  6. battle-hardened
  7. battle-line
  8. battle-lines
  9. battle-royal
  10. battle-royale
  11. battle-sark

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: battle-hardened (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “battle-hardened.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/battle-hardened. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.