Word.ws English Dictionary

hard-r

hard-r is the alternative form of hard r.

Meaning of hard r

Noun

hard r (plural hard r's)

  1. (informal) A rhotic sound which is emphatic or strongly enunciated; in English accents especially a postvocalic consonantal r, as distinguished from its absence in a nonrhotic accent or from an R-coloured vowel.
    • Her English accent was still noticeable, though hard r's surfaced in it from time to time.1978, Margaret Atwood, “Polarities”, in Dancing Girls and other stories, Seal edition, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart-Bantam, →ISBN, page 59
  2. (US) The hard r at the end of the word nigger when spoken with a General American accent and considered more offensive than the African-American Vernacular English pronunciation conventionally spelled nigga, whose final sound is sometimes called soft a.
    • First and foremost / You are under no circumstances / Ever permitted / To say the n-word / I don't care if it's soft a or hard r2016 May 5, MItchell Joseph Sewell, Standpoint: Black Queer Southern Revelations, University of South Carolina - Columbia, Senior Theses. 87, page 45; Tips for a Successful Interracial Relationship

See all 3 meanings of hard r

Noun capitalized: hard-R

hard-R (plural hard-Rs)

  1. (alternative) Alternative form of hard R.

Forms of hard-r

pluralhard-rs
pluralhard-Rs

Questions about hard-r

What is hard-r the alternative form of?
Hard-r is the alternative form of hard r.
What part of speech is hard-r?
Hard-r is a noun.
What is the plural of hard-r?
The plural of hard-r is hard-rs.

Words near hard-r in the dictionary

  1. hard-of-hearing
  2. hard-on
  3. hard-ons
  4. hard-paste
  5. hard-pressed
  6. hard-r
  7. hard-reset
  8. hard-resets
  9. hard-resetting
  10. hard-right
  11. hard-rs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hard-r (page history and authors); hard-R (page history and authors); hard r (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.

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