Word.ws English Dictionary

hair pipe

hair pipe noun: a type of long, cylindrical bead from North America used in the creation of personal adornments, principally by Native Americans.

Noun

hair pipe (plural hair pipes)

  1. A type of long, cylindrical bead from North America used in the creation of personal adornments, principally by Native Americans.
    • Wampum, Weoka / “ hair pipes, Waebosndata1850, Caleb Atwater, “Rudiments of the Grammar of the Sioux Language”, in The Indians of the Northwest: Their Maners, Customs, &c. &c,, Columbus, →OCLC, page 168
    • About 1850 he, in connection with his brother James, invented a machine for drilling wampum hair-pipe, which is manufactured from conch-shells and clam-shells.1882, “XXIV: The Bench and Bar of Bergen County”, in W. Woodford Clayton, William Nelson, editors, History of Bergen and Passaic Counties, Philadelphia: Everts & Peck, page 107

Examples of hair pipe in a sentence

  • The Kiowas used brass earrings, from each of which was suspended a hair pipe, which in turn supported a brass chain with a German-silver ornament at the end.1977, Ronald P. Koch, “5: Native Ornaments”, in Dress Clothing of the Plains Indians, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, →ISBN, →OCLC...
  • Straight dancers wear ribbon shirts with bandoliers made of bone hair pipes and beads, generally from one to four strands wide, […]2012, “Powwow Dance”, in Elizabeth DeLaney Hoffman, editor, American Indians and Popular Culture, volume 1, Preager, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 299:

Forms of hair pipe

pluralhair pipes
alternative formhair-pipe
alternative formhairpipe

Origin of hair pipe

Obscure, possibly from hair + pipe, as a description of one of its uses. Earliest known usage from 1767.

Questions about hair pipe

What does hair pipe mean?
Hair pipe means a type of long, cylindrical bead from North America used in the creation of personal adornments, principally by Native Americans.
How do you use hair pipe in a sentence?
The Kiowas used brass earrings, from each of which was suspended a hair pipe, which in turn supported a brass chain with a German-silver ornament at the end.
What part of speech is hair pipe?
Hair pipe is a noun.
What is the plural of hair pipe?
The plural of hair pipe is hair pipes.

Words near hair pipe in the dictionary

  1. hair pencils
  2. hair pie
  3. hair pies
  4. hair pin
  5. hair pins
  6. hair pipe
  7. hair pipes
  8. hair plate
  9. hair plates
  10. hair play
  11. hair plug

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hair pipe (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:

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