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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
hard-hearted
adjective
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ a hard-hearted and unprincipled man
▪ I've tried to help in the past, but I think now I have to be hard-hearted and make them help themselves.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ A good organiser is totally objective, even downright hard-hearted in choosing venue, style, speakers and programme.
▪ Anabelle watched him go, thinking that she had never met so many hard-hearted and spiteful creatures in her whole short life.
▪ Another case of hard-hearted capitalists pushing aside the less fortunate to enhance their investments?
▪ Clinton began his political comeback after the debacle of the 1994 congressional elections as the protector of the elderly from hard-hearted Republicans.
▪ It proves you're not as hard-hearted as I imagined.
▪ Love and politics clash when Maggie falls for a hard-hearted soldier.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Hard-hearted

Hard-hearted \Hard"-heart`ed\ (-h[aum]rt`[e^]d), a. Unsympathetic; inexorable; cruel; pitiless. -- Hard"-heart`ed*ness, n.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
hard-hearted

also hardhearted, "obdurate, unfeeling," late 12c. (implied in heard-heortnesse "hard-heartedness"); from hard + hearted. Sometimes in Middle English also meaning "bold, courageous" (15c.). Related: Hard-heartedly; hard-heartedness. Hard-heart "hard-hearted person" was in late Old English.

Wiktionary
hard-hearted

a. (alternative form of hardhearted English)

Usage examples of "hard-hearted".

In going thither, I was joined, just as I was stepping out of my shop, by Mr Stoup, the excise gauger, and Mr Firlot, the meal-monger, who had made a power of money a short time before, by a cargo of corn that he had brought from Belfast, the ports being then open, for which he was envied by some, and by the common sort was considered and reviled as a wicked hard-hearted forestaller.

No, if we really are so calculating and hard-hearted, would it not be better, having jumped down, simply to whack the fallen servant on the head again and again with the same pestle, so as to kill him finally, and, having eradicated the witness, to put all worry out of our mind?

She sounded remarkably hard-hearted for a girl barely of marriageable age.

A moment later, Zorzi included all marriageable young women in one sweeping condemnation: they were all hard-hearted, mercenary, vain, deceitful--anything that suggested itself to his headlong resentment.

I look forward to the time when we educators of the present generation will be considered incredibly hard-hearted, unconscientious, immoral, for acquiescing so contentedly in the ruthless sacrifice of the weak to the culture of the strong.

He is a hard-hearted churl who can read with unmoistened eyes this journal of a brave and talented girl.

Sally and Nia returned several hours later, hours which Riley had spent pissily bemoaning his lot to a hard-hearted Morgaine.

And,' then he flashed her a grin, 'I'm not as hard-hearted as that old geezer Reidinger was.

The device of transferring contemporary anomalous states of things to an imaginary world on the Moon, forgotten valleys or the future, in order to subject them to a hard-hearted scrutiny in the disguise of overstatement, is still used in science fiction, but whereas the Moon-and-Forgotten-Valley satires dealt with contemporary problems, the science fiction author of today particularly works with subjects of a social, political or scientific nature that are likely to become topical in the near or foreseeable future.

And so the blood-mottled figure had been left as a warning to all such hard-hearted employers, and the three noble avengers had hurried off into the mountains where unbroken nature comes down to the very edge of the furnaces and the slag heaps.