Abrasion-resistant materials have attracted great attention for their broad applications in industry, biomedicine and military. However, the development of abrasion-resistant materials that have with unique features such as being lightweight and flexible remains a great challenge in order to satisfy unmet demands. The outstanding performance of natural abrasion-resistant materials motivates the development of new bio-inspired abrasion-resistant materials. This review summarizes the recent progress in the investigation of natural abrasion-resistant materials to explore their general design principles (i.e., the correlation between chemical components and structural features). Following natural design principles, several artificial abrasion-resistant materials have shown unique abrasion-resistant properties. The potential challenges in the future and possible solutions for designing bio-inspired abrasion-resistant materials are also briefly discussed.