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
Old sceptics, hard-bitten by a quarter of a century of nothingness, were beginning to turn.
From BBC • Jan. 31, 2025
Cleo is “such an Artful Dodger character — pretty hard-bitten, pretty cynical, not sentimental,” Jonas Pate says.
From Los Angeles Times • Feb. 27, 2023
Philip Marlowe, wearily played by Liam Neeson, is the hard-bitten private detective invented by Raymond Chandler in a series of stories and novels mostly published in the 1930s and ’40s.
From New York Times • Feb. 14, 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
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From Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus, Third Edition Copyright © 2013 by the Philip Lief Group.