Word.ws English Dictionary

crosshair

crosshair noun: alternate form of crosshairs; a reticle in the shape of a pair of crossed hairs (thin perpendicular lines) in the sight of a firearm.

Noun

crosshair (plural crosshairs)

  1. Alternate form of crosshairs; a reticle in the shape of a pair of crossed hairs (thin perpendicular lines) in the sight of a firearm.
    • I'm just a crosshair / I'm just a shot away from you2004, Franz Ferdinand (band), “Take Me Out”, in Franz Ferdinand

Verb

crosshair (third-person singular simple present crosshairs, present participle crosshairing, simple past and past participle crosshaired)

  1. To focus on within a reticle.
    • Watching hopefully for a buck to come along behind the does, I eyed them through the scope of the borrowed .243. From time to time, I crosshaired the vital areas .1970, Nebraskaland - Volume 48, Issues 8-49, page 21
    • The next moment it was crosshaired by the electronic sights .1979, Soviet Military Review, page 24
  2. (broadly) To target.
    • She fired a smile at him, the likes of which he hadn't seen in years—since Meg, in fact, had crosshaired him at the junior prom with one of those flirtations that he never would've believed the president of the Methodist Girls' Youth Group was capable of.1996, Jeffery Deaver, A Maiden's Grave
    • My kinfolks had crosshaired in on the truth of the world.2004, The Iron Mountain Review - Volume 20, page 24

Examples of crosshair in a sentence

  • V.'s deputies standing behind a truck about a hundred feet away, crosshairing a rifle straight at him.2011, Carolyn Dennis-Willingham, No Hill for a Stepper, page 234:
  • A red glowing reticle crosshaired whatever the laser's muzzle was pointed at, together with flickering numbers giving range, bearing, and probable targetID.2014, Ian Douglas, The Complete Legacy Trilogy:

All 10 example sentences with crosshair

Forms of crosshair

Noun
pluralcrosshairs
Verb
third-person singular presentcrosshairs
present participlecrosshairing
past participlecrosshaired
pastcrosshaired

Origin of crosshair

From cross + hair.

Words formed from crosshair

Questions about crosshair

What does crosshair mean?
Crosshair means alternate form of crosshairs; a reticle in the shape of a pair of crossed hairs (thin perpendicular lines) in the sight of a firearm.
How do you use crosshair in a sentence?
V.'s deputies standing behind a truck about a hundred feet away, crosshairing a rifle straight at him.
What part of speech is crosshair?
Crosshair can be a noun or a verb.
What is the plural of crosshair?
The plural of crosshair is crosshairs.

Words near crosshair in the dictionary

  1. crossgrading
  2. crossgrained
  3. crossgrainedness
  4. crossguard
  5. crossguards
  6. crosshair
  7. crosshaired
  8. crosshairing
  9. crosshairs
  10. crosshanded
  11. crosshandedly

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: crosshair (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-crosshair.wav.

Cite this entry: “crosshair.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/crosshair. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.