Someone or something described as hidebound is inflexible and unwilling to accept new or different ideas.

// Although somewhat stuffy and strict, the professor did not so completely adhere to hidebound academic tradition that he wouldn’t teach class outside on an especially lovely day.

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“He was exciting then, different from all the physicists I worked with in the way that he was so broadly educated and interested, not hidebound and literal, as my colleagues were.” — Joe Mungo Reed, Terrestrial History: A Novel, 2025

Hidebound has its origins in agriculture. The adjective, which appeared in English in the early 17th century, originally described cattle whose skin, due to illness or poor feeding, clung to the skeleton and could not be pinched, loosened, or worked with the fingers (the adjective followed an earlier noun form referring to this condition). Hidebound was applied to humans too, to describe people afflicted with tight skin. Figurative use quickly followed, first with a meaning of “stingy” or “miserly.” That sense has since fallen out of use, but a second figurative usage, describing people who are rigid or unyielding in their actions or beliefs, lives on in our language today.