hard shoulder

1. 1.

   a paved strip beside a motorway (for stopping in emergencies)

   Broadershoulder

   United Kingdom

Questions about hard shoulder

What does hard shoulder mean?

hard shoulder means "a paved strip beside a motorway (for stopping in emergencies)".

Is hard shoulder a common word?

hard shoulder is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.