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Allin

hardship

nounverbattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈhɑːdˌʃɪp//
  • United States//ˈhɑɹdˌʃɪp//

Difficulty or trouble; hard times.

noun

  1. 1

    Difficulty or trouble; hard times.

    He has survived periods of financial hardship before.

    If train services of this kind were to be cut off, without any provision of alternative services, there would, of course, be hardship in some cases.

    The TUCC's role was to assess what (if any) hardship a BR closure proposal would cause, and to make recommendations to ministers who would have the final say.

  2. 2

    A burden, a source of difficulty that could impose a barrier.

    When you visit the museum, we invite you to make a donation of $10 if this will not be a hardship.

Etymology

From Middle English hardshipe, equivalent to hard + -ship.

verb

  1. 1

    To treat (a person) badly; to subject to hardships.

    […] an adjustment of the income tax could easily produce the twenty millions without hardshipping any industrious person in the community […]

    Although we lost the election by the narrowest of margins, the people of Oregon heard a great deal about education, and particularly about how "look-say" reading instruction was hardshipping Oregon school children.

Forms

plural
hardships
past tense
hardshipped
past participle
hardshipped
present participle
hardshipping
third person singular
hardships
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).