hairy

(hâr'ē)
adj., -i·er, -i·est.

1. Covered with hair or hairlike projections: a hairy caterpillar.
2. Consisting of or resembling hair: a hairy overcoat.
3. Slang. Fraught with difficulties; hazardous: a hairy escape; hairy problems.

hairiness hair'i·ness n.

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adjective

1. Covered with hair: fleecy, furry, fuzzy, hirsute, pilose, woolly. See smooth/rough.
2. Involving possible risk, loss, or injury: adventurous, chancy, dangerous, hazardous, jeopardous, parlous, perilous, risky, treacherous, unsafe, venturesome, venturous. See safety/danger.

adj

Definition: dangerous
Antonyms: calm, safe

adj

Definition: having much hair
Antonyms: bald, balding, clean, hairless, short-haired

1. Annoyingly complicated. “DWIM is incredibly hairy.”

2. Incomprehensible. “DWIM is incredibly hairy.”

3. Of people, high-powered, authoritative, rare, expert, and/or incomprehensible. Hard to explain except in context: “He knows this hairy lawyer who says there's nothing to worry about.” See also hirsute.

There is a theorem in simplicial homology theory which states that any continuous tangent field on a 2-sphere is null at least in a point. Mathematically literate hackers tend to associate the term ‘hairy’ with the informal version of this theorem; “You can't comb a hairy ball smooth.” (Previous versions of this entry associating the above informal statement with the Brouwer fixed-point theorem were incorrect.)

The adjective ‘long-haired’ is well-attested to have been in slang use among scientists and engineers during the early 1950s; it was equivalent to modern hairy senses 1 and 2, and was very likely ancestral to the hackish use. In fact the noun ‘long-hair’ was at the time used to describe a person satisfying sense 3. Both senses probably passed out of use when long hair was adopted as a signature trait by the 1960s counterculture, leaving hackish hairy as a sort of stunted mutant relic.

In British mainstream use, “hairy” means “dangerous”, and consequently, in British programming terms, “hairy” may be used to denote complicated and/or incomprehensible code, but only if that complexity or incomprehesiveness is also considered dangerous.

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IN BRIEF: adj. - Having or covered with fur adj. - Hazardous and frightening.

Tutor's tip: Some parents "harry" (pressure) their children because they get too "hairy" (having lots of hair) between haircuts.

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adjective
adjective, dated

1: Difficult. (1848 —) .
W. Cooper The problem was of the kind that Mike described in his up-to-date slang as 'hairy' (1966).

2: hairy at (about, in, round) the heel(s) Ill-bred. So hairy-heeled, adjective, and simple hairy, in the same sense. (1890 —) .
N. Marsh I always say that when people start fussing about family and all that, it's because they're a bit hairy round the heels themselves (1962).

3: Out-of-date, passé. (1950 —) .

4: Frightening, hair-raising. (1966 —) .
Times Lord Snowdon said during a break for an orange juice: 'I was a bit frightened. Some bends are a bit hairy' (1972).

Previous:	hair, hackie, hackette
Next:	hairy eyeball, half, half-arsed

a pair-rule gene of Drosophila.

Previous:	hairpin, haemoglobin, haemo+
Next:	half-boat conformation, half-cell, half-chair conformation

Characterized by a covering of hairs.

• h. angels’ trumpet — datura metel.
• h. caltrop — kallstroemia hirsutissima.
• h. caterpillars — elongated mucosal erosions occur in mouths of horses grazing pasture infested with hairy caterpillars. See also erosive stomatitis.
• h. cell leukemia — a condition of humans, of which a counterpart is seen in cats. Previous name was reticuloendotheliosis.
• h. gousiektebossie — pachystigma pygmaeum.
• h. millet — see panicum effusum.
• h. panic grass — see panicum effusum.
• h. shakers — see border disease.
• h. thornapple — datura metel.
• h. vetch — see vicia villosa.

For a list of words related to hairy, see:

• Physical Attributes

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See words rhyming with "hairy."

Dansk (Danish)
adj. - håret, behåret, modbydelig, farlig, håragtig, hår-, gammel (om vittighed)

Nederlands (Dutch)
harig, behaard, haarachtig, hachelijk, voortreffelijk

Français (French)
adj. - poilu, velu, chevelu, (Bot) villeux, atroce

Deutsch (German)
adj. - haarig, behaart

Ελληνική (Greek)
adj. - μαλλιαρός, τριχωτός, δασύτριχος

Italiano (Italian)
peloso, capelluto

Português (Portuguese)
adj. - peludo, cabeludo, hirsuto

Русский (Russian)
волосатый, волосяной, страшный, опасный, старый, с бородой

Español (Spanish)
adj. - peludo, melenudo

Svenska (Swedish)
adj. - hårig, besvärlig, skräckfylld

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
多毛的, 长毛的, 毛状的

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
adj. - 多毛的, 長毛的, 毛狀的

한국어 (Korean)
adj. - 털이 많은, 등골이 오싹한, 힘드는 , 험한

日本語 (Japanese)
adj. - 毛深い, 毛のような, 毛だらけの

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(صفه) مكسو بالشعر, أشعر كثير الشعر, شعري مصنوع من شعر, فظ, رهيب‏

עברית (Hebrew)
adj. - ‮מכוסה שיער, שעיר‬

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