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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
hard-working
adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ NOUN
people
▪ I think myself that this was the case, and that it scarcely makes him very different from many other hard-working people.
▪ We tried to emphasize a system where you put things in place and hire smart, hard-working people.
▪ These friendly and hard-working people will not wait for much longer to reclaim their birthright.
▪ They are fine people, hard-working people.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Grand Forks residents, their memories short, took it out on that nice, hard-working and inspirational Pat, they say.
▪ Is the Court deaf, dumb and blind to the plight of its hard-working employees?
▪ John Heredia is a hard-working truck driver, father of nine and a Little League coach.
▪ Scholarly and intensely hard-working, his otherwise serious nature was lightened by a streak of mischief.
▪ The Seasiders cantered to victory against a hard-working Halifax outfit, despite the presence of four newcomers in the 13.
▪ These young men, taciturn, hard-working, serious, did not conduct themselves in what Mr Bullins considered the correct manner.
▪ Those behind the proposition are a group of hard-working volunteers who want to improve Tucson.
▪ We tried to emphasize a system where you put things in place and hire smart, hard-working people.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
hard-working

also hardworking, 1774, from hard + working (see work (v.)).

Usage examples of "hard-working".

Like any Amish wife, Barbara is one hard-working gal, but up until my quilt proposition, she had never earned any outside money.

A drunken woman had been killed by her husband, a hard-working artizan, who had been maddened by the ruin of his home.

And the fact remained, whatever games the gods played, it was hard-working dirt-poor bastards like him who suffered for it.

Saturday the Council of the Eureka Stockade counted in the majority honest men, themselves hard-working diggers, they would not turn burglars or permit anybody to do so in their name.

The man had loathed De Haus since he had been a hard-working undergraduate.

Eighty per cent or more of those now in Hawaii are of the Ilocano tribe--thriftiest and most hard-working of all the Filipinos.

I did this experiment in four frenzied weeks in 1984 with a fanatically hard-working, Warsaw-based autoradiographer, Margaret Kossut, and repeated them in more detail the following year with a neuroanatomist from Budapest, Andras Csillag, who helped identify the anatomical structures in which Margaret and I had found the changes.

Using my chemical expertise, I constructed a highly sophisticated explosives laboratory in the basement of a house I was renting from Brian Roscommon, a hard-working Irish immigrant and upstanding Newton resident.

This hard-working General, having garrisoned Zeerust and Lichtenburg, had left his old district and journeyed with a force which consisted largely of Bushmen and Yeomanry to the disturbed parts of Bechuanaland which had been invaded by De Villiers.

Most of my work was for second-rate clothing stores that had too much shoplifting, hard-working bookies whose wives had gone for Chiclets and never came back, and old ladies who had lost their cats, who were always named Sheiba.

Naturally of an energetic and hard-working temperament, he very soon fell more or less into the swing of the thing, and at the end of six weeks began to talk quite learnedly of cattle and ostriches and sweet and sour veldt.

After I had fallen over eight or nine precipices and thus found out that one half of my brain had been asleep eight or nine times without the wide-awake, hard-working other half suspecting it, the periodical unconsciousnesses began to extend their spell gradually over more of my brain-territory, and at last I sank into a drowse which grew deeper and deeper and was doubtless just on the very point of being a solid, blessed dreamless stupor, when--what was that?

When again I was drawn up the Erbsberg, the hard-working line was reeling off petits battements sur le cou-de-pied: fine sweeping arm movements that sprinkled innumerable classical dots on the soft thawing air.

If its funds were lavished in patronage and show, instead of being honestly expended in providing small annuities for hard-working people who have themselves contributed to its funds - if its management were intrusted to people who could by no possibility know anything about it, instead of being invested in plain, business, practical hands - if it hoarded when it ought to spend - if it got by cringing and fawning what it never deserved, I might possibly impress you very much by my indignation.

Under the Provident head, certain small annuities are granted to old and hard-working subscribers.