Word.ws English Dictionary

fascinator

fascinator noun: a fascinating person or thing.

fascinator: a fascinating person or thing
Image: Chris Phutully from Australia, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

fascinator (plural fascinators)

  1. (literal) A fascinating person or thing.
    • A more repellent personality would be hard to imagine, and yet Hedda Gabler is one of the eternal fascinators of the world stage.2009 January 18, Charles Isherwood, “Hedda Forever: An Antiheroine for the Ages”, in New York Times
  2. A delicate, often frivolous head decoration worn on the hair, primarily by women.
    • Westminster Abbey was peppered with everything from neat pillbox hats to netted fascinators.2023 May 6, Chloe Mac Donnell, “Coronation fashion sprang few surprises – but all eyes were on Penny Mordaunt”, in The Guardian
    • Why, for example, was Lady Gaga the first act? Surrounded by pink ostrich feathers and wearing a fascinator that looked like a feather quill atop her head, she put on her best French accent to sing Mon truc en plumes (originally by Zizi Jeanmaire) but it still looked like a scrappy, tacky...2024 July 26, Arifa Akbar, “Paris Olympics opening ceremony review – soaring ambition deflated by patchy delivery”, in The Guardian, →ISSN
  3. (US, dated) A type of wool or lace headscarf.

Forms of fascinator

pluralfascinators

Origin of fascinator

From fascinate + -or.

Words formed from fascinator

Questions about fascinator

What does fascinator mean?
Fascinator means a fascinating person or thing.
What part of speech is fascinator?
Fascinator is a noun.
What is the plural of fascinator?
The plural of fascinator is fascinators.

Words near fascinator in the dictionary

  1. fascinating
  2. fascinatingly
  3. fascinatingness
  4. fascination
  5. fascinations
  6. fascinator
  7. fascinators
  8. fascinatress
  9. fascinatresses
  10. fascine
  11. fascine knife

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fascinator (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-fascinator.wav.

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