The Oxford Thesaurus An A-Z Dictionary of Synonyms INTRO ...

harbinger n. forerunner, herald, precursor, omen, foretoken, sign,
portent, augury: The crowing cock is the harbinger of dawn.
harbour n. 1 port, (safe) haven, anchorage, mooring: We sailed into
the harbour just as the storm broke.
--v. 2 shelter, keep safe, protect, shield, guard, safeguard,
conceal, hide: They were found guilty of harbouring a known
fugitive. 3 cherish, foster, nurture, nurse, keep, retain,
maintain, hold, cling to: She harbours a grudge against whoever
set the fire.
hard adj. 1 rigid, stiff, solid, inflexible, firm, dense, condensed,
compressed, close, solidified, hardened; stony, rocklike,
concrete, petrified, granite(-like), flinty, steely; tough,
rugged, leathery, callous; unyielding, adamant(ine),
impenetrable, obdurate, impervious, impregnable: The cement
gets hard in an hour. This steak is as hard as shoe-leather.
The metal was so hard that I broke three drills trying to make a
hole in it. 2 difficult, laborious, arduous, back-breaking,
burdensome, onerous, fatiguing, tiring, exhausting, wearying,
strenuous, tough, toilsome: Laying track for the railway is a
very hard job. 3 difficult, perplexing, knotty, puzzling,
baffling, enigmatic, intricate, complicated, complex, tangled,
involved, thorny, incomprehensible, inscrutable, unsolvable,
insoluble, Colloq tough: There were a lot of hard questions in
the exam. 4 stern, cold, callous, intractable, exacting,
strict, demanding, hard-hearted, stony-hearted, severe,
tyrannical, despotic, dictatorial, magisterial, oppressive,
cruel, ruthless, pitiless, merciless, savage, brutal, brutish,
inhuman, heartless, harsh, unkind, implacable, unsympathetic,
dispassionate, uncompassionate, unfeeling, obdurate, indurate;
unsentimental, insensitive, thick-skinned, tough, hard-boiled,
stony, hardbitten, unfeeling, unsparing: Hemel is a hard
taskmaster. Of the prison warders, each was harder than the
next. He advocates taking a hard line against white-collar
crime. 5 bad, difficult, grievous, calamitous, racking,
disastrous, dark, grim, distressing, devastating, agonizing,
painful, unpleasant, severe, austere, Colloq tough, rough: The
years of the Great Depression were hard for everyone. 6 cool,
unemotional, calculating, uncompromising, methodical, critical,
systematic, practical, pragmatic, businesslike, realistic,