Word.ws English Dictionary

hard yakka

/hɑːd ˈjækə/

hard yakka noun: hard work.

Noun

hard yakka (uncountable)

  1. (Australia, New Zealand, colloquial) Hard work.
    • The men who did all the hard yakka believed in a short cut – shoot the bastards; it was cheaper and easier.1988, Tom Cole, Hell West and Crooked, page 247
    • somebody sits down and does the solid, hard yakka of talking his way through with the waterside workers and with the union movement generally1991, Kim Beazley, Australian House of Representatives

Origin of hard yakka

From hard + yakka, from Yagara yaga (“work”).

Questions about hard yakka

What does hard yakka mean?
Hard yakka means hard work.
What part of speech is hard yakka?
Hard yakka is a noun.
How do you pronounce hard yakka?
Hard yakka is pronounced /hɑːd ˈjækə/.

Words near hard yakka in the dictionary

  1. hard work
  2. hard worker
  3. hard workers
  4. hard X-ray
  5. hard X-rays
  6. hard yakka
  7. hard yards
  8. hard-and-fast
  9. hard-arse
  10. hard-arses
  11. hard-ass

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hard yakka (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: EN-AU ck1 hard yakka.ogg.

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