Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. acting as a hard taskmaster or dominating woman.

1944		J.A. Weingarten Amer. Dict. Sl. (1954) 15/2: ball-busting (adj.) difficult.
1959		Kerouac Doctor Sax 39: Jey-sas Crise gawd damn ballbreaking sonofabitch.
1971		J.D. Horan Blue Messiah 184: So [...] there isn’t a real ball-busting cops’ union? One that would go all out for the guys on the beat?
1971		T. Whitmore Memphis-Nam-Sweden 118: That same ball-breaking hillbilly private.
1979		F. Norman Too Many Crooks Spoil the Caper 218: I waited expectantly for the air to turn blue with women’s lib ball-breaking invective.
1989		J. & C. Kimbrell Barbra 419: Behavior which is acclaimed in a man as dynamic, thorough and deliberate is belittled in a woman as that of a ballbreaking shrew.
1999		Indep. Rev. 2 July 15: A revenge killing of a boyfriend’s ball-busting boss.
1997		J. Neugeboren Don’t Worry About the Kids 59: My father went crazy, screaming that my mother was a cockteasing ballbusting slut.
1999		K. Sampson Powder 484: Fucken ball-breaking is about right, lar. Breaking rocks while Massa McCluskey cracks the whip.
2001		Guardian G2 29 Mar. 15: The only interesting thing about my job is when I get to bear witness to the ball-breaking insensitivity of surgeons.
2006		A. Roche Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel 24: He is hellbent on giving maximum offense, butchering even the most sacred cow of the Irish mammy through the hideous, ballbreaking figure of Ryan’s mother.
2007		I. Haus Blue Justice 10: Her new sergeant was well aware of the nickname whispered around the GIB offices. Kay also guessed that the ballbusting feminist probably liked it.
2020		C. Hiaasen Squeeze Me 320: The most powerful person on the planet [...] watched his ball-busting wife march off.

2. physically demanding, exhausting.

1960		S. Krim (ed.) Beats 76: [He] acted more like a Hollywood caricature of a ‘genius’ than a person with the ballbreaking desire to uphold the immortal flame of art .
1981		(con. Vietnam War) A. Santoli Everything We Had (1982) 93: That was the most terrible fucking humping I ever did in my life. That really was a ball-breaking hump.

3. very irritating.

1970		E. Tidyman Shaft 12: Fuck it. And all the rest of this ball-breaking bullshit.
1978		D. DeLillo Running Dog (1992) 243: They start in with their complications, with their ball-breaking little remarks.

4. highly enjoyable.

1973

J. Wambaugh Onion Field 84: ‘[S]ome of these other joints [...] have lots of groupin where you sit around and tell lies to each other and have a ball-bustin good time’.

5. aggressive, cruel.

2006

T. Coyne Paper Tiger 140: They share the same ballbusting sense of humor.