hard-grained

• “Like all digital technologies, the iPhone has yet to achieve the hard-grained, Spartan elegancies of the steely Leatherman.”

  Self-Reliance 2008

• “In the hard-grained face of Wegg, and in his stiff knotty figure (he looked like a German wooden toy), there was expressed a politic conciliation, which had no spontaneity in it.”

  Our Mutual Friend

• “On the ground were placed, in two rows, sixteen chairs, made of hard-grained cedar.”

  Hung Lou Meng

• “By the close of that first day it was clear that the hero of this expedition was going to be Harry Jensen, the cotton picker from South Carolina, for this hard-grained little fellow had a score of ingenious ideas remembered from his boyhood days in the cypress swamps along the Little Pee Dee in his home state.”

  Space

• “His eyes were still closed and his mouth was open and a mixture of saliva and blood drained out on the hard-grained wood.”

  Simon & Schuster: Half of Paradise

• “Besides all this, she has a sort of hard-grained little vein of common sense, against which my fanciful conceptions and poetical notions are apt to hit with just a little sharp grating, if they are not well put.”

  The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 76, February, 1864

• “I found the men putting clear boards with hard-grained streaks in them in with the No. 1 clear.”

  The Valley of the Giants

• “She was eager to learn much else beyond the hard-grained muses of the square and cube; she was the daughter of a prosperous and boldly experimental physician, whose wife was a champion of women's rights.”

  Mrs. Warren's Daughter A Story of the Woman's Movement

• “Her first astonished questions having been met with silence by the honest but hard-grained woman who kept the laundry, Ida had not condescended to any further appeal.”

  The Unclassed

• “The hard-grained old pirate-stock Northward has built the land, and is to the front when we are at our epic work.”

  One of Our Conquerors — Volume 4

Show 10 more examples...