Hackwork definitions and example sentences on Wordnik

“

I see that we get a little more destitute every day: that the boarders are melting away; that I am reduced to unthinkably sordid hackwork, and you to the grind of uncongenial toil; that Peggy can't afford to keep a cook who can boil a potato respectably (they were like walnuts to-day) that she and the children go about with their clothes dropping off them.

—The Lee Shore

View all »
Definitions (3)

American Heritage Dictionary (2)

noun Commissioned work, such as writing or acting, done usually by formula and in conformance with commercial standards.
noun Tedious, monotonous, or uninteresting work of any kind.

Century Dictionary

GNU Webster's 1913

WordNet (1)

Elsewhere on the web

View all »
Examples (44)

None dare call it hackwork: Malzberg is the Iron Man of genre writing. — FSF,October2007
Most of what got printed was formula hackwork, ground out to order, debased copies of some better writer's original. — F ;SF - vol 104 issue 06 - June 2003
"Frankenstein legend" for our time is simply genre hackwork, which places some Frankenstein characters in a mystery-crime thriller, with smatterings of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. — comicbookbin.com
Juno is mordantly hilarious and totally right-on. own review of 4 Months is, frankly, a turgid piece of hackwork that is appalling compared to these brilliant considerations — In The Company Of Glenn
"Consider the armadillo" does indeed sound like journalistic hackwork, all the more because it's in the form of a early formulation, Geoff Pullum defined snowclones as "some-assembly-required adaptable cliché frames for lazy journalists." — Language Log