Word of the Day: Hardscrabble

Hardscrabble: (adj.) Earning a bare subsistence, as on the land; yielding little by great labor, marginal: the sharecropper's hardscrabble life; meager, meagerly, meagre, scrimpy, stingy

Hardscrabble is formed from hard (from Old English heard) + scrabble (from Dutch schrabbelen, "to scratch").

I remember it being green and humid, nothing like this hardscrabble land.

-- Elmore Leonard, Cuba Libre

Most inhabitants scratched out a living from hardscrabble farming, yet these newcomers were hopeful and enterprising.

-- Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.

A scenic town fed by rich snowbirds who reside a few months a year in gated communities, High Balsam also is home to the hardscrabble residents who frequent Margaret's food-pantry giveaways.

-- Deirdre Donahue, "A sweet 'Evensong", USA Today, December 2, 1999

Related adjectives: amain, elaborate, energetic, epitonic, faffle, hard at work, hardscrabble, industrious, insudate, laboriferous, laboring, laborious, laboristic, moliminous, on the stretch, operose, painstaking, palestric, panurgic, strained, strenuous, toilsome, trusatile, uphill, wearisome, womanfully