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
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
A lieutenant had approached, an older man, hard-bitten by years in the desert, with a full beard—save for a large, horizontal scar across his left cheek.
From "The Many Assassinations of Samir, the Seller of Dreams" by Daniel Nayeri
![]()
From Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus, Third Edition Copyright © 2013 by the Philip Lief Group.