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

“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

The guards, some of whom had previously identified themselves as pacifists, fell quickly into the role of hard-bitten disciplinarians.

From "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell