hardscrabble
/ˈhɑɹdˌskɹæbəl/
hardscrabble adjective: requiring much work to farm, and ultimately not very productive.
Adjective
hardscrabble (not comparable)
- Requiring much work to farm, and ultimately not very productive.
- his hardscrabble peanut farm
- In the case of Allegheny Briskow, poverty, the drought, the grinding hardships of these hard-scrabble Texas counties, had dwarfed the intellect, the very soul of a splendid young animal.1922, Rex Ellingwood Beach, chapter V, in Flowing Gold
- Involving hard work and struggle.
- He leads a hardscrabble existence.
- Being the savage’s bowsman, that is, the person who pulled the bow-oar in his boat (the second one from forward), it was my cheerful duty to attend upon him while taking that hard-scrabble scramble upon the dead whale’s back.1851 November 14, Herman Melville, chapter 72, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC
Examples of hardscrabble in a sentence
- While Rose tried to keep up with Westbrook, the Knicks’ Carmelo Anthony struggled mightily, going 4 of 19 for 18 hardscrabble points.2016 November 28, Mike Vorkunov, “Despite Flash of Rose’s Prime, Knicks Are Dazed by Westbrook and Thunder”, in The New York Times...
- Grace and her twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) lost their mother during birth, and their alcoholic father during their hardscrabble childhood.2024 October 23, Jacob Oller, “Clay weepy Memoir Of A Snail crawls through a gauntlet of misery”, in AV Club, archived from the original on...
Forms of hardscrabble
| alternative form | hard-scrabble |
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Origin of hardscrabble
From hard + scrabble.
Words that rhyme with hardscrabble
Questions about hardscrabble
- What does hardscrabble mean?
- Hardscrabble means requiring much work to farm, and ultimately not very productive.
- How do you use hardscrabble in a sentence?
- While Rose tried to keep up with Westbrook, the Knicks’ Carmelo Anthony struggled mightily, going 4 of 19 for 18 hardscrabble points.
- What part of speech is hardscrabble?
- Hardscrabble is an adjective.
- How do you pronounce hardscrabble?
- Hardscrabble is pronounced /ˈhɑɹdˌskɹæbəl/ (US).
Words near hardscrabble in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: hardscrabble (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:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-hardscrabble.ogg.
Cite this entry: “hardscrabble.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hardscrabble. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.