hard-bitten
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
The cabbie, a hard-bitten postcommunist cynic, asks her if she’s visiting the archives “for work or fun.”
From The Wall Street Journal • Nov. 30, 2025
He is hard-bitten by reality in these games, after all.
From BBC • Dec. 14, 2024
“He has become the go-to for people who see L.A. as a cynical, hard-bitten city,” Carlos Valladares, a film scholar and Los Angeles native, told me at Doyle’s reading event.
From Los Angeles Times • Dec. 10, 2024
Portis’s final novel, “Gringos,” which appeared in 1991, is a neo-noir that consolidates all the anxiety, comedy and magic of his previous work into the travails of a hard-bitten American expatriate named Jimmy Burns.
From Washington Post • Apr. 13, 2023
It was a strange opposition: the hard-bitten private-eye expression on the face of a girl wearing a uniform for private school.
From "Middlesex: A Novel" by Jeffrey Eugenides
![]()
From Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus, Third Edition Copyright © 2013 by the Philip Lief Group.