Word.ws English Dictionary

hard-nosed

hard-nosed adjective: guided by practical experience and observation rather than by theory.

Adjective

hard-nosed

  1. Guided by practical experience and observation rather than by theory.
  2. (idiomatic) Hardheaded, stubborn.
  3. Tough and relentlessly practical and thus not given to sentiment.

hard-nosed meaning in Bengali and Malayalam

hard-nosed in Bengali

একগুঁয়ে, জেদি

hard-nosed in Malayalam

unsentimental, tough-minded, no-nonsense
ബുദ്ധിക്കു തെളിവും സ്ഥിരതയുമുള്ള, യാഥാർധ്യബോധം കെെവിടാത്ത, വ്യാമോഹങ്ങളില്ലാത്ത, മൃദുലവികാരങ്ങൾക്കു കീഴ്പ്പെടാത്ത, നല്ല മനക്കട്ടിയുള്ള, ഉറച്ചമനസ്സുള്ള

Origin of hard-nosed

hard + nosed; originally referred to hard-tipped bullets.

Questions about hard-nosed

What does hard-nosed mean?
Hard-nosed means guided by practical experience and observation rather than by theory.
What is hard-nosed in Bengali?
Hard-nosed in Bengali is একগুঁয়ে, জেদি. See Hard-nosed meaning in Bengali.
What part of speech is hard-nosed?
Hard-nosed is an adjective.

Words near hard-nosed in the dictionary

  1. hard-luck
  2. hard-luck stories
  3. hard-luck story
  4. hard-mouthed
  5. hard-nose
  6. hard-nosed
  7. hard-noses
  8. hard-of-hearing
  9. hard-on
  10. hard-ons
  11. hard-paste

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hard-nosed (page history and authors); hard-nosed (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); hard-nosed (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license). 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.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-hard-nosed.ogg, en-us-hard-nosed.ogg.

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