hardtack

Other forms of hardtack

plural

hardtacks·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about hardtack

What does hardtack mean?

hardtack means "very hard unsalted biscuit or bread; a former ship's staple". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in hardtack?

hardtack has 2 syllables: hard-tack. The stress falls on "hard".

What is another word for hardtack?

Close synonyms include pilot biscuit, pilot bread, sea biscuit, ship biscuit. 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 hardtack a common word?

hardtack 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.