Crossword clues for hardscrabble
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1804, U.S. colloquial, the name of an imaginary barren place "where a livelihood may be obtained only under great hardship and difficulty;" from hard + scrabble. First recorded in journals of Lewis and Clark. Perhaps the original notion is "vigorous effort made under great stress," though this sense is recorded slightly later (1812).
Wiktionary
a. Of or pertaining to land that takes a lot of work in order to farm and even then is not very productive.
WordNet
Wikipedia
Hardscrabble, or Hard Scrabble is a term used to describe rocky or poor quality land, as in the term hardscrabble farm. It is often used as a euphemism for any sort of hard working or poverty, as in hardscrabble childhood. A number of towns used this name:
- Ione, California, formerly Hardscrabble
- Streator, Illinois, formerly Hardscabble
- Farmingdale, New York, formerly Hardscrabble
- Hardscrabble, Ohio
- Scrabble, West Virginia, formerly Hard Scrabble
- Hardscrabble, Indiana, town in Indiana
- Hardscrabble, Delaware, unincorporated community in Sussex County, Delaware
- Hardscrabble, a neighborhood in Midtown Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
- Hard Scrabble and Snow Town, two African-American neighborhoods in 19th-century Providence, Rhode Island
- The village of "Hardscrabble", incorporated into the town of Hamilton, today's Cobourg, Ontario
- Hardscrabble (album), a 2012 electronic music album by The Flashbulb
- A log cabin built by Ulysses S. Grant, now located at Grant's Farm
Hardscrabble is a small section of Midtown Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It is bounded by the Susquehanna River to the west, Reily Street to the north, 3rd street to the east and Verbeke Street to the south. The neighborhood is mostly residential and has a diverse housing stock ranging from American colonial to Queen Anne style. It has experienced slightly less gentrification than surrounding parts of Midtown, but the strong housing stock along Verbeke and 2nd Street continues to attract new residents.
Hardscrabble is a historic home located near Bahama, Durham County, North Carolina. It consists of two houses, one Georgian and one Federal, covered by a common cross-gable roof in the late-19th century. The Georgian was built about 1779 and the Federal section in the 1790s.
It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.
Usage examples of "hardscrabble".
There was something about the sound of a railroad whistle in the night to inspire young folk stuck with a heap of chores on a hardscrabble homestead to try their luck hopping freight trains to far places.
Gangly, gap-toothed, Inman seemed out of place in the hardscrabble town of 200, where his father operated the local Sinclair gasoline station.
He found gardening tools in the back seat, a level patch of hardscrabble off the access road to the Hollywood Sign and buried Mickey Cohen's would-be assassin in a plot about 4 by 4 by 4, working with an earth spade and grub hoe.