hardy

Etymology

From Middle English hardy, hardi, from Old French hardi (“hardy, daring, stout, bold”). Old French hardi is usually regarded as the past participle of hardir ("to harden, be bold, make bold"; compare Occitan ardir, Italian ardire), from Frankish *hardijan; but it may also have come directly from Frankish *hardi, a secondary form of Frankish *hard (compare Old High German harti, herti, secondary forms of Old High German hart (“hard”)); or even yet from Frankish *hardig (compare Middle Low German herdich (“persevering”), Old Danish hærdig, Norwegian herdig, Swedish härdig (“vigorous, courageous”)). Cognate with hard. May have at some point also been surface analysed as hard + -y.

adj

1. Having rugged physical strength; inured to fatigue or hardships.
2. (botany) Able to survive adverse growing conditions.
   A hardy plant is one that can withstand the extremes of climate, such as frost.
   Even adding 1mm of thickness to the cardboard, to make it hardier, might use up a substantial forest when multiplied across hundreds of billions of boxes. November 21 2019, Samanth Subramanian, “How our home delivery habit reshaped the world”, in The Guardian
   By watching where the snow melted first, I discovered warmer spots that I knew would be possible locations for late-winter bloomers or borderline hardy plants. 2012, David L. Culp, The Layered Garden: Design Lessons for Year-Round Beauty from Brandywine Cottage, Timber Press, page 503
3. Brave and resolute.
4. Impudent.

noun

1. (usually in the plural) Anything, especially a plant, that is hardy.
   Across the country, various bands of journalistic hardies — newsroom pros whose services are no longer salient to a crippled and disrupted information economy — have taken matters into their own hands. June 1, 2009, David Carr, “Cast Out, but Still Reporting”, in New York Times
2. A blacksmith's fuller or chisel, having a square shank for insertion into a square hole in an anvil, called the hardy hole.