Word.ws English Dictionary

hard at work

hard at work phrase: labouring with great effort and diligence; working hard.

Phrase

hard at work

  1. (idiomatic) Labouring with great effort and diligence; working hard.
    • I'm sorry I can't make it to the party—I'm going to be hard at work all day.
    • The relegation of locomotives to storage seemed to be on a very unsystematic basis on all three principal Irish railways: while one member of a class was rusting in a yard, another might be hard at work in revenue-earning service—[…].1959 June, R. A. Young, “A Railway Holiday in Ireland—2”, in Railway Magazine, page 416

Questions about hard at work

What does hard at work mean?
Hard at work means labouring with great effort and diligence; working hard.
What part of speech is hard at work?
Hard at work is a phrase.

Words near hard at work in the dictionary

  1. hard as iron
  2. hard as nails
  3. hard as the nether millstone
  4. hard ask
  5. hard at it
  6. hard at work
  7. hard atheism
  8. hard atheist
  9. hard atheists
  10. hard boil
  11. hard bop

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hard at work (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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