Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Having a close, firm grain.
  • Unattractive; not amiable or inviting.

Etymologies

Sorry, no etymologies found.

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Examples

  • Like all digital technologies, the iPhone has yet to achieve the hard-grained, Spartan elegancies of the steely Leatherman.

    Self-Reliance 2008 2008

  • Like all digital technologies, the iPhone has yet to achieve the hard-grained, Spartan elegancies of the steely Leatherman.

    Self-Reliance 2008 2008

  • Like all digital technologies, the iPhone has yet to achieve the hard-grained, Spartan elegancies of the steely Leatherman.

    Self-Reliance 2008 2008

  • In the hard-grained face of Wegg, and in his stiff knotty figure (he looked like a German wooden toy), there was expressed a politic conciliation, which had no spontaneity in it.

    Our Mutual Friend 2004

  • On the ground were placed, in two rows, sixteen chairs, made of hard-grained cedar.

    Hung Lou Meng 2003

  • By the close of that first day it was clear that the hero of this expedition was going to be Harry Jensen, the cotton picker from South Carolina, for this hard-grained little fellow had a score of ingenious ideas remembered from his boyhood days in the cypress swamps along the Little Pee Dee in his home state.

    Space Michener, James 1982

  • His eyes were still closed and his mouth was open and a mixture of saliva and blood drained out on the hard-grained wood.

    Half of Paradise James Lee Burke 1965

  • Besides all this, she has a sort of hard-grained little vein of common sense, against which my fanciful conceptions and poetical notions are apt to hit with just a little sharp grating, if they are not well put.

    The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 76, February, 1864 Various

  • On the ground were placed, in two rows, sixteen chairs, made of hard-grained cedar.

    Hung Lou Meng, Book I Or, the Dream of the Red Chamber, a Chinese Novel in Two Books Xueqin Cao

  • I found the men putting clear boards with hard-grained streaks in them in with the No. 1 clear.

    The Valley of the Giants 1918

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