Hard-bitten

adj

adj ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Callous and toughened by experience.

    "Its author, we must remember, was above all a man of action, an elected official, a captain, a traveler, and a pragmatic intellectual, a successful combatant against warrior and disease alike, hardbitten and intimate with both privilege and disgrace, a man who suffered with and outlived most of the greatest men of his age."

Adjective
  1. 1
    tough and callous by virtue of experience wordnet

Example

More examples

"Its author, we must remember, was above all a man of action, an elected official, a captain, a traveler, and a pragmatic intellectual, a successful combatant against warrior and disease alike, hardbitten and intimate with both privilege and disgrace, a man who suffered with and outlived most of the greatest men of his age."

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.