"hardball" meaning in English

See hardball in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Adjective

Audio: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Wodencafe-hardball.wav [US] Forms: more hardball [comparative], most hardball [superlative]
Etymology: hard + ball Etymology templates: {{compound|en|hard|ball}} hard + ball Head templates: {{en-adj}} hardball (comparative more hardball, superlative most hardball)
  1. Being or exhibiting tough or ruthless behavior, especially in combat, politics or business. Derived forms: play hardball
    Sense id: en-hardball-en-adj-YkOtb2kL

Noun

Audio: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Wodencafe-hardball.wav [US] Forms: hardballs [plural]
Etymology: hard + ball Etymology templates: {{compound|en|hard|ball}} hard + ball Head templates: {{en-noun|~}} hardball (countable and uncountable, plural hardballs)
  1. (ball games) In baseball, a type of ball and baseball game, as opposed to softball. Tags: countable, uncountable Categories (topical): Ball games
    Sense id: en-hardball-en-noun-NfXgqEPs Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, English entries with language name categories using raw markup, English retronyms Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 21 38 22 20 Disambiguation of English entries with language name categories using raw markup: 16 52 17 16 Disambiguation of English retronyms: 20 40 19 21 Topics: ball-games, games, hobbies, lifestyle, sports
  2. Tough or ruthless behavior, especially in combat, politics or business. Tags: countable, uncountable
    Sense id: en-hardball-en-noun-eRMjOQiS

Verb

Audio: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Wodencafe-hardball.wav [US] Forms: hardballs [present, singular, third-person], hardballing [participle, present], hardballed [participle, past], hardballed [past]
Etymology: hard + ball Etymology templates: {{compound|en|hard|ball}} hard + ball Head templates: {{en-verb}} hardball (third-person singular simple present hardballs, present participle hardballing, simple past and past participle hardballed)
  1. (informal, transitive) To exhibit tough and ruthless behavior towards another individual. Tags: informal, transitive
    Sense id: en-hardball-en-verb-XmPEmoUt

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for hardball meaning in English (5.1kB)

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      ],
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-04-30 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (210104c and c9440ce). 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.