harsh
adj.adj. unpleasant, cruel, or very strict. You use it to describe things like cold weather, loud sounds, or a person being too mean.
adj. unpleasantly rough, jarring, or severe in effect. When applied to social conduct, it describes a lack of leniency or an excess of critical rigor.
The winter wind feels very harsh today.
The manager's harsh criticism during the meeting made the new employee feel quite discouraged.
While the landscape appears beautiful from a distance, the harsh reality of the desert climate makes survival difficult for any species not specifically adapted to extreme aridity.
From Middle English harsk, harisk(e), hask(e), herris. Century derived the term from Old Norse harskr (whence Danish harsk (“rancid”), dialectal Norwegian hersk, Swedish härsk); the Middle English Dictionary derives it from that and Middle Low German harsch (“rough”, literally “hairy”) (whence also German harsch), from haer (“hair”), from Old Saxon hār, from Proto-West Germanic *hār; the Oxford Dictionary of English derives it from Middle Low German alone.
Commonly modifies nouns related to sensory input (light, sound) or social judgment (criticism, punishment).