See hard yards on Wiktionary
{
"etymology_text": "A sporting analogy referring to the game of rugby football, where making progress on the field, in measurements of yards, may lead to accomplishment and victory.\nAlternatively derived from sailing, when furling or unfurling the canvas from certain (perhaps higher) spars was both dangerous and difficult.",
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"examples": [
{
"text": "do the hard yards",
"type": "example"
},
{
"text": "put in the hard yards",
"type": "example"
},
{
"ref": "2007, Ian Cocoran, The Art of Digital Branding, Allworth Press, →ISBN, pages 128–129:",
"text": "As with coupons and vouchers, there is seemingly no end to the opportunities that exist to improve a Web site's traffic flow by giving something away for nothing—as long as users are prepared to put in the hard yards, of course.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "2010, Kelly Doust, A Life in Frocks, Sydney: Murdoch Books, →ISBN, page 129:",
"text": "Those clever women at the frontier of fashion do all the hard yards for us, every month, by attending the shows in London, Paris and New York.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "2017 August 22, Peter Lewis, “In a tough campaign the marriage equality team faces hard yards ahead”, in The Guardian:",
"text": "In tough conditions, with no room for complacency, the campaign will need to slog out the hard yards, give it 110% and leave it all on the field.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "2021 December, Jon Dale, “Dead Moon fever!”, in Uncut, →ISSN, page 8:",
"text": "The couple had already put in the hard yards: Fred started out in '60s freakbeat combos The Weeds and Lollipop Shoppe, with Toody joining him in early '80s punk trio The Rats.",
"type": "quote"
}
],
"glosses": [
"The key effort in completing a difficult task."
],
"id": "en-hard_yards-en-noun-5LhEK7if",
"raw_glosses": [
"(originally Australia) The key effort in completing a difficult task."
],
"synonyms": [
{
"word": "heavy lifting"
}
],
"tags": [
"plural",
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]
}
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"word": "hard yards"
}
{
"etymology_text": "A sporting analogy referring to the game of rugby football, where making progress on the field, in measurements of yards, may lead to accomplishment and victory.\nAlternatively derived from sailing, when furling or unfurling the canvas from certain (perhaps higher) spars was both dangerous and difficult.",
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{
"text": "put in the hard yards",
"type": "example"
},
{
"ref": "2007, Ian Cocoran, The Art of Digital Branding, Allworth Press, →ISBN, pages 128–129:",
"text": "As with coupons and vouchers, there is seemingly no end to the opportunities that exist to improve a Web site's traffic flow by giving something away for nothing—as long as users are prepared to put in the hard yards, of course.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "2010, Kelly Doust, A Life in Frocks, Sydney: Murdoch Books, →ISBN, page 129:",
"text": "Those clever women at the frontier of fashion do all the hard yards for us, every month, by attending the shows in London, Paris and New York.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "2017 August 22, Peter Lewis, “In a tough campaign the marriage equality team faces hard yards ahead”, in The Guardian:",
"text": "In tough conditions, with no room for complacency, the campaign will need to slog out the hard yards, give it 110% and leave it all on the field.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "2021 December, Jon Dale, “Dead Moon fever!”, in Uncut, →ISSN, page 8:",
"text": "The couple had already put in the hard yards: Fred started out in '60s freakbeat combos The Weeds and Lollipop Shoppe, with Toody joining him in early '80s punk trio The Rats.",
"type": "quote"
}
],
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"The key effort in completing a difficult task."
],
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"(originally Australia) The key effort in completing a difficult task."
],
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{
"word": "heavy lifting"
}
],
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}
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"word": "hard yards"
}
Download raw JSONL data for hard yards meaning in All languages combined (2.7kB)
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"msg": "Form tags without form: desc='plural plural-only', tagsets=[('plural', 'plural-only')]",
"path": [
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"section": "English",
"subsection": "noun",
"title": "hard yards",
"trace": ""
}
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-02-15 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-02-02 using wiktextract (ca09fec and c40eb85). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.