Word.ws English Dictionary

hair-on-fire

hair-on-fire adjective: impassioned; eager; wild; crazy; rage-filled; frantic.

Adjective

hair-on-fire (not comparable)

  1. (idiomatic) Impassioned; eager; wild; crazy; rage-filled; frantic.
    • Almost no singer in rock enunciates better, and he used that skill to make noise: teeth-and-tongue clucking, gut-punch bellows, hair-on-fire shrieking.2003 September 9, Ben Ratliff, “Music Review: Fluttering Rat-a-tats to Celebrate a Birthday”, in New York Times, retrieved 22 Sep 2017
    • [T]he most common reactions to Ryan ranged from gnawing apprehension to hair-on-fire anger.2012 August 14, Tom McCarthy, “U.S. Politics: Paul Ryan heads west as convention slate unveiled”, in Guardian, UK, retrieved 22 Sep 2017

Questions about hair-on-fire

What does hair-on-fire mean?
Hair-on-fire means impassioned; eager; wild; crazy; rage-filled; frantic.
What part of speech is hair-on-fire?
Hair-on-fire is an adjective.

Words near hair-on-fire in the dictionary

  1. hair-knot
  2. hair-knots
  3. hair-like
  4. hair-net
  5. hair-nets
  6. hair-on-fire
  7. hair-pipe
  8. hair-pipes
  9. hair-pulling disorder
  10. hair-raiser
  11. hair-raisers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hair-on-fire (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-hair-on-fire.ogg.

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