Definition of "hard-bitten" []

• Toughened by experience. (adjective)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "We began with Deadline U.S.A., a film that is not strictly noir but according to Eddie has the power to make every hard-bitten city desk jockey “puddle up.”"
• "Conservatives, meanwhile, are buzzing over the cover story in the current Weekly Standard, in which Mark Hemingway argues that fact-checking as practiced by PolitiFact -- as well as by the Associated Press, the Washington Post and others -- is just old-fashioned liberal media bias gussied up in the cloak of hard-bitten objectivity."
• "This volume of gonzo musings completes the “accidental trilogy” begun in Blood Orchid and continued in Blues for Cannibals, offering more scorched-earth prophesying by the hard-bitten Bowden, a journalistic iconoclast in the tradition of Hunter S. Thompson, Edward Abbey, and James Agee."