Word.ws English Dictionary

hard up

hard up adjective: lacking money; impecunious; in financial difficulties.

Adjective

hard up (comparative more hard up, superlative most hard up)

  1. (colloquial) Lacking money; impecunious; in financial difficulties.
    • I can speak with authority on the subject of being hard up. I have been a provincial actor. If further evidence be required, which I do not think likely, […]1886, Jerome K. Jerome, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, On being hard up
    • Miss Frensham is young, but she is not beautiful, and to put it in that way is to pay her a noticeable compliment. She is also, I gather, regrettably hard up. Now, as I never conceal from my clients, my business is conducted on a purely financial basis […]1927, Ernest Bramah [pseudonym; Ernest Brammah Smith], Max Carrados Mysteries
  2. (colloquial) Lacking anything.
    • We were hard up for amusements.
  3. (broadly, colloquial) Desperate.
    • Dating him? She must be hard up.

Verb

hard up (third-person singular simple present hards up, present participle harding up, simple past and past participle harded up)

  1. Synonym of harden up (to become or make hard)
    Synonyms:
    harden up

hard up meaning in Urdu and Malayalam

hard up in Urdu

کنگال, قرق

hard up in Malayalam

short of money, poor, badly off
കെെയിൽ കാശില്ലാത്ത, ഇല്ലായ്മ കൊണ്ടു ഞെരുങ്ങുന്ന, ദരിദ്രിത, ദരിദ്രം, ദാരിദ്ര്യമുള്ള, ദാരിദ്ര്യപീഡിതമായ

Synonyms of hard up

30 more synonymsFewer synonyms

All synonyms of hard up

Forms of hard up

Adjective
comparativemore hard up
superlativemost hard up
alternative formhard-up
Verb
third-person singular presenthards up
present participleharding up
past participleharded up
pastharded up

Questions about hard up

What does hard up mean?
Hard up means lacking money; impecunious; in financial difficulties.
What is hard up in Urdu?
Hard up in Urdu is کنگال, قرق. See Hard up meaning in Urdu.
What part of speech is hard up?
Hard up can be an adjective or a verb.

Words near hard up in the dictionary

  1. hard time
  2. hard times
  3. hard to swallow
  4. hard truth
  5. hard truths
  6. hard up
  7. hard vore
  8. hard war
  9. hard water
  10. hard waters
  11. hard way

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hard up (page history and authors); hard up (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); hard up (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license). 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 up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hard_up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.