hardcore

UK/hɑː(ɹ)dˈkɔː(ɹ)/US/hɑː(ɹ)dˈkɔː(ɹ)/

adjectiveB2Common in everyday speech and writing · #4,738 of 15,258leans written

Hardcore means extreme and uncompromising in style or belief. Hardcore fans, a hardcore approach, hardcore punk.

It names musical genres — hardcore punk and hardcore techno both mean the fast uncompromising end of a style — and a hardcore of supporters means the group who never leave. In building, hardcore is the broken stone laid under a foundation.

Definitions of hardcore

1adjectivehardcoreExtreme and uncompromising in style or belief.B2
“He's a hardcore vegan who won't even wear leather shoes.”

hardcore is a quality of extremity.

Where it comes from

Hard plus core, from the phrase hard to the core. The building sense is recorded first, in 1936.

From hard + core: hard to the core; 1936 (n.); 1951 (adj.)

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

hardcore in the wild

Through the 1980s it spread to the hardcore scenes of Washington, D.C., Boston and New York where it developed local variants.
Moshing
Hardcore hip-hop (also known as hardcore rap) is a subgenre of hip-hop that developed through the East Coast hip-hop scene in the 1980s.
Hardcore hip-hop
Happy hardcore, also known as 4-beat, is a subgenre of hardcore dance music.
Happy hardcore
Sludge metal (also known as sludge doom or simply sludge) is an extreme subgenre of heavy metal music that combines elements of doom metal and hardcore punk.
Sludge metal
Meanwhile, bands like Title Fight and La Dispute experienced underground popularity playing music that bore a closer resemblance to the post-hardcore bands of the 1980s and 1990s.
Post-hardcore

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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