hardscrabble

English

Alternative forms

• hard-scrabble

Etymology

From hard +‎ scrabble.

Pronunciation

• (US) IPA^(key): /ˈhɑɹdˌskɹæbəl/

• Audio (US):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -æbəl

Adjective

hardscrabble (not comparable)

1. (Canada, US, of land) Requiring much work to farm, and ultimately not very productive.

   his hardscrabble peanut farm

   • 1922, Rex Ellingwood Beach, chapter V, in Flowing Gold‎^[1]:

     In the case of Allegheny Briskow, poverty, the drought, the grinding hardships of these hard-scrabble Texas counties, had dwarfed the intellect, the very soul of a splendid young animal.

   • 2018, Tim Flannery, Europe: A Natural History, page 286:

     Villages in the more remote and hard-scrabble regions, including some mountain areas, are being abandoned, and nature is starting to creep back.

2. (Canada, US, by extension) Involving hard work and struggle.

   He leads a hardscrabble existence.

   • 1851 November 14, Herman Melville, chapter 72, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC:

     Being the savage’s bowsman, that is, the person who pulled the bow-oar in his boat (the second one from forward), it was my cheerful duty to attend upon him while taking that hard-scrabble scramble upon the dead whale’s back.

   • 2016 November 28, Mike Vorkunov, “Despite Flash of Rose’s Prime, Knicks Are Dazed by Westbrook and Thunder”, in The New York Times‎^[2]:

     While Rose tried to keep up with Westbrook, the Knicks’ Carmelo Anthony struggled mightily, going 4 of 19 for 18 hardscrabble points.

   • 2024 October 23, Jacob Oller, “Clay weepy Memoir Of A Snail crawls through a gauntlet of misery”, in AV Club‎^[3]:

     Grace and her twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) lost their mother during birth, and their alcoholic father during their hardscrabble childhood.

Translations

involving hard work and struggle

• Finnish: vaivalloinen (fi)
• German: mühselig (de), entbehrungsreich (de)

Further reading

• “hardscrabble”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.