hardtack

See also: hard tack

English

Alternative forms

Etymology

From hard +‎ tack.

This etymology is incomplete. You can help Wiktionary by elaborating on the origins of this term.

Pronunciation

  • Audio (Southern England):(file)

Noun

hardtack (countable and uncountable, plural hardtacks)

  1. (nautical) A large, hard biscuit made from unleavened flour and water; formerly used as a long-term staple food aboard ships.
    Synonyms: pilot biscuit, pilot bread, sea biscuit, sea bread, ship's biscuit, ship biscuit, ship bread; (military slang) Anzac wafer, sheet iron, tooth duller, worm castle
    Hypernyms: tack; biscuit; bread
    Meronym: reefer's nut
    Coordinate term: soft tack
    • 1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter VIII, in Mr. Pratt’s Patients, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC:
      Philander went into the next room […] and came back with a salt mackerel that dripped brine like a rainstorm. Then he put the coffee pot on the stove and rummaged out a loaf of dry bread and some hardtack.
    • 1989, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated by H. T. Willetts, August 1914, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, →ISBN, page 71:
      Bread and fodder had to be brought up over longer and longer distances, it was more difficult all the time, transport was lacking, the army had already eaten two-thirds of its hardtack, exhausted men were marching in baking heat along sandy roads into emptiness!

Translations

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