hard time

1. 1.

   a difficulty that can be overcome with effort

   “we had a hard time getting here”

   “analysts predicted rough sledding for handset makers”

   Synonymsrough sledding

   Broaderdifficulty
2. 2.

   a term served in a maximum security prison

   Broaderprison term

Questions about hard time

What does hard time mean?

hard time means "a difficulty that can be overcome with effort". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

What is another word for hard time?

Close synonyms include rough sledding. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is hard time a common word?

hard time is banded "Uncommon" — turns up in careful writing rather than conversation. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.