Word.ws English Dictionary

hard r's

hard r's is the plural 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

Questions about hard r's

What is hard r's the plural of?
Hard r's is the plural of hard r.

Words near hard r's in the dictionary

  1. hard pull
  2. hard pulls
  3. hard pushed
  4. hard put
  5. hard r
  6. hard r's
  7. hard real-time
  8. hard redirect
  9. hard redirects
  10. hard reset
  11. hard resets

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hard r's (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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