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• hard-pressed
  hard-pressed

  adjective

  heavily burdened or oppressed, as by overwork or financial difficulties; harried; put-upon.
• hard pressed
  hard pressed

  Overburdened, put upon, as in With all these bills to pay we find ourselves hard pressed. [c. 1800]

hard-pressed

American  

[hahrd-prest] / ˈhɑrdˈprɛst /

Or hardpressed

adjective

1. heavily burdened or oppressed, as by overwork or financial difficulties; harried; put-upon.

   Synonyms:

   beleaguered

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hard-pressed British  

adjective

1. in difficulties

   the swimmer was hard-pressed

2. subject to severe competition

3. subject to severe attack

4. closely pursued

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hard pressed Idioms  

1. Overburdened, put upon, as in With all these bills to pay we find ourselves hard pressed. [c. 1800]

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Etymology

Origin of hard-pressed

First recorded in 1815–25

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

hard-pressed hard pressed

A teenager from County Down hopes an app he has developed will revolutionise how farms are run, giving hard-pressed farmers more time.

From BBC ● Aug. 20, 2026

And we’re hard-pressed to think of anyone who’s won a governor’s race after struggling to answer a question about whether Thanksgiving should be canceled.

From Slate ● Aug. 8, 2026

“In a blind tasting, unless they’re an expert, people would be hard-pressed to know that it is not a Scotch.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 16, 2026

It’s an incredible level of control that investors would be hard-pressed to find in publicly traded companies.

From Barron's ● May 20, 2026

Sometimes Autumn knows how I feel before I even tell her, which means I’d be hard-pressed to get anything past her.

From "Kwame Crashes the Underworld" by Craig Kofi Farmer

The proliferation of scientific journals has created an almost insatiable need, and professors on the treadmill of grants, research and publishing are hard pressed to fit in such volunteering.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 29, 2026

Throw in the affordability crisis — from food to energy bills — and you have an economic outlook that Nostradamus would be hard pressed to predict.

From MarketWatch ● Dec. 15, 2025

Experts in international law are hard pressed to find any legal justification for the administration’s action.

From Salon ● Sep. 7, 2025

When Ronan Keating answered a newspaper advert to audition for Boyzone in 1993, he would have been hard pressed to believe more than 30 years later he would still be hitting the stage.

From BBC ● Jun. 3, 2025

From eight billion light-years away we are hard pressed to find even the cluster in which our Milky Way Galaxy is embedded, much less the Sun or the Earth.

From "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan