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
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
Cleo is “such an Artful Dodger character — pretty hard-bitten, pretty cynical, not sentimental,” Jonas Pate says.
From Los Angeles Times • Feb. 27, 2023
Poor darling Briony, the softest little thing, doing her all to entertain her hard-bitten wiry cousins with the play she had written from her heart.
From "Atonement" by Ian McEwan
