hard-wired

hard-wired is the alternative spelling of hardwired.

hard-wired is the simple past and past participle of hard-wire.

Meaning of hardwired

hardwired (comparative more hardwired, superlative most hardwired)

Designed to perform a specific task.
(electronic communications) Of devices, closely or tightly coupled.
Having a fixed placement (on a screen format for example).
Not changeable.
Having made a belief or a pattern of behavior or a habit.
- I'm hardwired to have a shower every morning.
Describing genetically determined, instinctive behavior.

hard-wire (third-person singular simple present hard-wires, present participle hard-wiring, simple past and past participle hard-wired)

To connect components by means of permanent electrical wires.
To implement a feature in hardware rather than in software so that it cannot easily be changed.
(broadly) To make a pattern of behaviour automatic.
- "And the mindset of a silo of rail engineers, and a silo of highway engineers, and a silo of bus experts, and a silo of active travel people, you're not going to integrate just because you put them in one organisation.
  "You have to actively look at ways to cross-fertilise that thinking, to get...2024 February 7, Lee Waters tells Conrad Landin, “A mission to improve transport for Wales”, in RAIL, number 1002, page 34

comparative	more hard-wired
superlative	most hard-wired

What is hard-wired the alternative spelling of?: Hard-wired is the alternative spelling of hardwired.

Adapted from Wiktionary: hard-wired (page history and authors); hardwired (page history and authors); hard-wire (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: 2026-09-02

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