What is "hard-won"

Usage examples of "hard-won".

Uniting in himself the rigid piety of the Puritan with the genial, generous impulses of the cavalier, he won the love of all with whom he came in contact, from the thoughtless child, with whom it was ever his delight to sport, to the great captain of the age, with whom he fought all the hard-won battles of Mexico.

For three successive years he spent considerable money and effort, producing nothing except the hard-won conclusion that without irrigation his benchlands were useless, except to grow native grass for the grazing of cattle.

Her published dissertation on the family Bromeliaceae was backed up by years of fieldwork and countless hard-won miles trekking through the tropical forests of South America, and like all the naturalists who had gone before her, every mile had yielded a story of hardship and close calls.

They stripped him of all his trophies, all his hard-won honours, even his browband embroidered with the mark of the Hurnei, in a dreadful implacable silence.

She was itching to spend some of her hard-won gold, but if she went right to The Jugged Hare, Steifann would insist that she put most of it aside for safekeeping.

But the old neurochemists continue with their independent societies, journals and meetings, stuck in the 1960s and unable quite to submerge their hard-won identity for greater good.

Even with their aid it was a matter of unremitting labor in which Kennedy used all his intuitive skill, his hard-won knowledge, Penza his trained engineering ability.

As it happens, twenty years later the importance of the phosphoproteins became clear - but by then no-one, not even I, would know or care what I had written in that hard-won concluding chapter.

Anyone wanting power for its own sake gets only dribs and drabs, hard-won, harder to keep, and not worth having.

He absorbed everything around him, then let his cells rub up against each other until they produced a collection of nonserial gestalts, an almost random flow of metaphor into which he dipped a languid hand and came up with the answer or image or poem or equation or whatever it might be that something in him felt was needed, a zigzag sort of thinking that had many strengths and nothing at all to do with rigorous analysis of a problem or the development of a line of action step by hard-won step.

Scholars, grammarians, wits, and poets were content to bury the lustre of their wisdom and the hard-won fruits of their toil in the winding-sheet of a dead language, that they might be numbered with the family of Cicero, and added to the pious train of Virgil.

It was resting at the top of one of these hard-won acclivities that we came upon--and remember that it was the middle of October--two wild roses blooming by the roadside.

A squad of architects had been told to dream the dreams of the contemporary businessman, and to give that dream the weight of concrete and steel: economy of line, public space/private space, dynamism melding into hard-won repose.

As he lay there day after day he had to accept the situation as it was, and to be thank ful that there was one among his children to whom he could entrust the future of his family and the possibilities of his hard-won land.

It appeared he had been kept waiting for some time and, lacking Peace's hard-won stoicism, was nearing a state of apop­lexy.