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.

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