Other forms: harder, hardest
Hard means it does not give when you press it. Stone, ice, a dry crust of bread, the bench you have been sitting on for an hour.
The second meaning is just as common: difficult. A hard question, a hard day, a hard climb up the last hill. Hard also means harsh — hard words, a hard look, being hard on your children — and it doubles as an adverb: work hard, hit hard, think hard, it's raining hard. Then a whole run of fixed uses: hard water leaves scale in the kettle, hard evidence is proof you can hold up in court, and there is hard cash, hard drugs, hard of hearing. The trap is hardly, which does not mean 'in a hard way' — it means barely, so 'I hardly worked' is close to the opposite of 'I worked hard'.
1adjectivehardFirm and solid; not soft or easily pressed in.~35%
“The ground was too hard to dig.”
2adjectivedifficultDifficult to do, understand or deal with.~35%
“That was a hard exam and nobody finished it.”
3adjectiveharshHarsh, severe or showing little kindness.~2%
“Don't be too hard on him — he only started last week.”
4adverbeffortWith a lot of effort, force or intensity.~17%
“It was raining hard by the time we left the station.”
5adjectivewaterOf water: containing a lot of minerals, so soap lathers badly.~9%
“Hard water has furred up the inside of the kettle.”
6adjectivefactsOf facts or evidence: definite and provable.~2%
“There is no hard evidence linking him to the fire.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 14 sentences found in the wild and placed 11 of them on a sense (3 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Hard runs back through Old English heard and Proto-Germanic *harduz to a Proto-Indo-European root *kret-, 'strong, powerful'. The same root surfaces in Ancient Greek κρατύς, 'strong, mighty', and in a Sanskrit word for power and ability. German hart and Swedish hård are the same word, barely changed after fifteen hundred years.
Middle English
hard
English, today
hard
Built from
From Middle English hard. From Middle English hard, from Old English heard, from Proto-West Germanic hard(ī), from Proto-Germanic harduz, from Proto-Indo-European kort-ús, from kret- (“strong, powerful”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA