hardscrabble

adj.
Earning a bare subsistence, as on the land; marginal: the sharecropper's hardscrabble life.

n.
Barren or marginal farmland.

(HARD-skrab-uhl)

adjective
1. Yielding little for much effort.
2. Relating to a place that provides for bare subsistence.

Etymology
From English hard + Dutch schrabbelen (to scrape). Ultimately from the Indo-European root sker- (to cut) that's also the source of words such as skirt, sharp, scrape, screw, shard, shears, carnage, curt, and carnivorous

Usage
"How did young Mildred, a homely, chubby, fatherless kid, reared on a hardscrabble Iowa farm during the Great Depression manage to work up the genius to relish every minute of her life?" — Elizabeth Gilbert; The Home Place; The New York Times; Jul 1, 2007.

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1) being or relating to a piece of barren or barely arable soil
2) marked by poverty

Note: click on a word meaning below to see its connections and related words.

The adjective has 2 meanings:

Meaning #1: yielding little by great labor
  Synonym: poor

Meaning #2: of a bare living gained by great labor
  Synonym: marginal

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