Word.ws English Dictionary

hairshirts

hairshirts is the plural of hairshirt.

Meaning of hairshirt

Noun

hairshirt (plural hairshirts)

  1. A shirt made of haircloth; especially one worn by ascetics or the penitent.
    • He is practically a total abstainer and I can affirm that he sleeps on a straw litter and eats the most Spartan food, cold dried grocer’s peas. He wears a hairshirt winter and summer and scourges himself every Saturday.1922 February 2, James Joyce, “[Episode 15: Circe]”, in Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company […], →OCLC, part II [Odyssey], page 466
  2. (figuratively) A state of penitence and humility.
    • And when he went on to say, “The curse must be within ourselves,” Muir bequeathed us a hairshirt: the guilty conscience that plagues so many of us when we see what we are doing to the rest of nature.1981 June 21, Joseph Kastner, “Whole Earth Controversy”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, page 71

See all 3 meanings of hairshirt

Questions about hairshirts

What is hairshirts the plural of?
Hairshirts is the plural of hairshirt.

Words near hairshirts in the dictionary

  1. hairsedge
  2. hairshaft
  3. hairshafts
  4. hairshirt
  5. hairshirted
  6. hairshirts
  7. Hairsine
  8. hairslide
  9. hairslides
  10. hairsnake
  11. hairsplit

Source and license

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