hard-bittenadj.

1686 R. Blome Gentlemans Recreation iii. xiii. 97/2 You should not run any that are worth much at this chase, but such that are hard bitten Dogs that will seize any thing.

1784 M. Hunter Jrnl. (1894) 65 So hard-bitten an animal that all the torture you can use will not make him leave his hold.

1829 W. Scott Guy Mannering (new ed.) II. xxiv. 322 They will be hard-bitten terriers will worry Dandie.

1859 ‘Stonehenge’ Dog iv. 273 The consequence of pulling anything out of the young retriever's mouth is that he becomes ‘hard bitten’, as it is called.

1903 Blackwood's Edinb. Mag. Sept. 366/2 Wounded birds..are very apt to pitch amongst the gorse, from whence it takes a hard-bitten dog to retrieve them.

1978 D. B. Plummer Tales of Rat-hunting Man iii. 37 I would wait around these stables until someone arrived with a writhing bag of ferrets and a few rough-coated, ugly, hard-bitten terriers.

1999 Herald (Glasgow) (Nexis) 13 Mar. 10 The Parson himself would not keep a hard-bitten dog. These dogs have good natures, good temperaments, and good kind eyes.

1819 Times 4 Aug. Some hard-bitten fellow assailed the orator with a line from Swift, ‘Fine words—I wonder where you stole 'em’.

1857 T. Hughes Tom Brown's School Days ii. viii. 384 They looked such hard-bitten, wiry, whiskered fellows, that their young adversaries felt rather desponding as to the result of the morrow's match.

1913 W. J. Locke Stella Maris xiii. 156 The hard-bitten vagabond of the highroad has his or her well-defined means of livelihood.

1948 Life 14 June 69/1 These divergent groups, born in the blood and fire of the Protestant revolution, brought to America the hard-bitten individualism of the Reformation.

1971 R. Allen Suedehead vi. 47 The people did not have those hard-bitten eyes now. These were theatre-goers and Soho proper advoidees [sic].

2007 N.Y. Times Mag. 5 Aug. 14/1 No longer do today's neopermanent campaigners have a campaign chairman..and a hard-bitten campaign manager.