Word.ws English Dictionary

hair-splittings

hair-splittings is the plural of hair-splitting.

Meaning of hair-splitting

Noun

hair-splitting (countable and uncountable, plural hair-splittings)

  1. (derogatory, idiomatic) The act of considering or arguing about exceedingly small differences, fine details, and/or edge cases of no seeming importance, worrying about minutiae.
    • Regardless of the ultimate judgment and any hair splitting, the CIA seemed to many Americans to have regressed to and even surpassed its criminal-like behavior during the pre-Church Committee hearings era.2014, Richard H. Immerman, The Hidden Hand: A Brief History of the CIA

See all 2 meanings of hair-splitting

Questions about hair-splittings

What is hair-splittings the plural of?
Hair-splittings is the plural of hair-splitting.

Words near hair-splittings in the dictionary

  1. hair-splitter
  2. hair-splitters
  3. hair-splittery
  4. hair-splitting
  5. hair-splittingly
  6. hair-splittings
  7. hair-tidies
  8. hair-tidy
  9. hair-trigger
  10. hair-triggers
  11. hairball

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hair-splittings (page history and authors); hair-splitting (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-splittings.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hair-splittings. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.