Describing a place or life that involves hard work, poverty, and a constant struggle to survive.
Compound of 'hard' and 'scrabble' (to scratch or claw at something desperately). Emerged in American English to describe frontier farming on marginal land or poor urban neighborhoods.
Hardscrabble towns like those in Appalachia inspired the term—settlers literally had to scrabble and scratch at rocky, poor soil to farm, and the word captured both their physical struggle and their determination to survive.
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