Word.ws English Dictionary

hardpressed

hardpressed adjective: subject to difficulty in accomplishing or making progress.

Adjective

hardpressed (comparative more hardpressed, superlative most hardpressed)

  1. Subject to difficulty in accomplishing or making progress.
    • “Wilderness” is that rare young adult novel that can speak to every member of the family: hardpressed moms, perceptive fathers, belligerent girls and risk-taking boys.2007 September 16, Jerry Griswold, “Children’s Books / Young Adult”, in New York Times

Forms of hardpressed

comparativemore hardpressed
superlativemost hardpressed

Origin of hardpressed

From hard + pressed.

Questions about hardpressed

What does hardpressed mean?
Hardpressed means subject to difficulty in accomplishing or making progress.
What part of speech is hardpressed?
Hardpressed is an adjective.

Words near hardpressed in the dictionary

  1. hardpanned
  2. hardpans
  3. hardpaste
  4. hardpoint
  5. hardpoints
  6. hardpressed
  7. Hardred
  8. Hardrick
  9. Hardricks
  10. hardrock
  11. hardrocks

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hardpressed (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.

Last updated:

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