Word.ws English Dictionary

hardest

UK/ˈhɑːdɪst//ˈhɑɹdɪst/

hardest is the superlative form of hard.

Meaning of hard

Adjective

hard (comparative harder or more hard, superlative hardest or most hard)

  1. Solid and firm.
    • Luckily she wasn’t there any more, no one was, when he returned from the Caribbean carnival damp-hatted and soaked through after being caught unprepared by a squall of hard, hot rain.2001, Salman Rushdie, Fury: A Novel, London: Jonathan Cape, →ISBN, page 5
    1. Resistant to pressure; difficult to break, cut, or penetrate.
      • This bread is so stale and hard, I can barely cut it.
    2. Strong.
    3. Containing alcohol.
      • hard cider, hard lemonade, hard seltzer, hard soda
    4. Very acidic or tannic.
      • While most 1974s remain hard, tannic, hollow wines lacking ripeness, flesh, and character, a number of the Graves estates did produce surprisingly spicy, interesting wines.2002, Robert M. Parker (Jr.), Pierre-Antoine Rovani, Parker's Wine Buyer's Guide (page 175)
    5. High in dissolved chemical salts, especially those of calcium.

See all 43 meanings of hard

Words formed from hardest

Phrases with hardest

Questions about hardest

What is hardest the superlative form of?
Hardest is the superlative form of hard.
How do you pronounce hardest?
Hardest is pronounced /ˈhɑːdɪst/ (UK).

Words near hardest in the dictionary

  1. Harderian gland
  2. Harderian glands
  3. harders
  4. Harderses
  5. Harderwijk
  6. hardest
  7. hardest going
  8. hardest hit
  9. hardest left
  10. hardest nut to crack
  11. hardest nuts to crack

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hardest (page history and authors); hard (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-us-hardest.ogg.

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