Word.ws English Dictionary

hard going

hard going adjective: difficult to understand and enjoy.

Adjective

hard going (comparative harder going, superlative hardest going)

  1. (especially) Difficult to understand and enjoy.
    • THE CONCISE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF WORLD RAILWAY LOCOMOTIVES. Edited by P. Ransome-Wallis. Hutchinson. 50s. […] Its only noticeable defect is inconsistency in presentation and loose editing, which make its use harder going for the amateur than need be.1960 January, “New reading on railways”, in Trains Illustrated, page 26
    • Later passages, like this one on computer programming languages, are harder going: […]2024 December 18, Daisy Fried, “The History of Poetry, From the Bronze Age to A.I., in a Single Poem”, in The New York Times Book Review, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC...
  2. Difficult and requiring a lot of effort.

Forms of hard going

comparativeharder going
superlativehardest going

Questions about hard going

What does hard going mean?
Hard going means difficult to understand and enjoy.
What part of speech is hard going?
Hard going is an adjective.

Words near hard going in the dictionary

  1. hard freeze
  2. hard freezes
  3. hard g
  4. hard gainer
  5. hard gainers
  6. hard going
  7. hard goods
  8. hard gs
  9. hard hand
  10. hard handed
  11. hard hands

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hard going (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 going.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hard_going. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.