Hardness

How to spell hardness

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce hardness

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hardness mean?

1. nounThe quality of being solid, firm, or resistant to pressure, scratching, or denting.
2. nounSeverity, harshness, or lack of warmth in someone's manner or circumstances.

Hardness in a sentence

• The hardness of the steel made it ideal for cutting tools.

• There was a hardness in her voice that ended the discussion.

• Geologists test the hardness of a mineral by scratching it against known samples.

• Years of poverty had given his face a certain hardness.

Where does hardness come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a thoroughly native English word, descending from the Old English heardnes, which combined the adjective heard, meaning 'firm, solid, or unyielding', with the noun-forming suffix -nes. That suffix is one of the oldest and most productive tools in the language; it turns an adjective describing a quality into a noun naming that quality, exactly as it does in 'darkness' and 'kindness'. The root heard belongs to a wide Germanic family, with close relatives in Dutch hard and German hart, all reaching back to a shared ancestor meaning 'strong' or 'bold'. Over the centuries the word broadened from purely physical firmness to figurative senses such as severity of manner or difficulty of circumstance, and later it acquired technical uses in mineralogy and chemistry, including the familiar measure of a mineral's resistance to scratching and the level of dissolved minerals in water. The spelling is dependably regular: it is simply hard plus ness, and the only point to watch is the double s that every -ness word carries.

How the word is built

• hard (firm, solid)
• -ness (suffix forming a noun of quality or state)