Word.ws English Dictionary

hair-curling

hair-curling adjective: exciting, astonishing, frightening, or horrifying.

Adjective

hair-curling (comparative more hair-curling, superlative most hair-curling)

  1. (idiomatic) Exciting, astonishing, frightening, or horrifying.
    • But, first and foremost, "Retreat with Stilwell" is a rip snorting, spine tingling, hair curling story, and as such it is quite likely to hold you.1943 March 14, Arthur Otis, “Belden Pens a Hair-Curling Story of Disaster in Burma”, in Chicago Daily Tribune, retrieved 09 Nov 2010, page F10
    • Many of Mr. Dahl's stories are hair-curling tales of man's inhumanity to man, particularly woman's to man.1960 February 7, Lewis Nichols, “In and Out of Books”, in New York Times, page BR8
    Synonyms:
    hair-raising

Examples of hair-curling in a sentence

  • [T]he era of good feeling Carter has created in his party . . . could be a prelude to an activist presidency bent on shaking and changing the status quo with hair-curling audacity.1976 July 18, Eugene Patterson, “They're not saying ‘Jimmy Who?’”, in St. Petersburg Times, retrieved 09 Nov 2010:
  • If the walls . . . could talk, they would reveal some hair-curling secrets.2008 October 7, J. Gibson, E. Tadros, “A touch of nostalgia up for grabs”, in Sydney Morning Herald, Australia, retrieved 09 Nov 2010:

Synonyms of hair-curling

Forms of hair-curling

comparativemore hair-curling
superlativemost hair-curling
alternative formhair curling
alternative formhaircurling

Questions about hair-curling

What does hair-curling mean?
Hair-curling means exciting, astonishing, frightening, or horrifying.
How do you use hair-curling in a sentence?
[T]he era of good feeling Carter has created in his party . . . could be a prelude to an activist presidency bent on shaking and changing the status quo with hair-curling audacity.
What part of speech is hair-curling?
Hair-curling is an adjective.

Words near hair-curling in the dictionary

  1. hair-brown
  2. hair-brush
  3. hair-brushes
  4. hair-clip
  5. hair-clips
  6. hair-curling
  7. hair-do
  8. hair-dos
  9. hair-dresser
  10. hair-dressers
  11. hair-drier

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hair-curling (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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Cite this entry: “hair-curling.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hair-curling. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.