Word.ws English Dictionary

hangnails

hangnails is the plural of hangnail.

Meaning of hangnail

Noun

hangnail (plural hangnails)

  1. A loose, narrow strip of nail tissue protruding from the side edge and anchored near the base of a fingernail or toenail.
    Synonyms:
    agnail, backfriend
  2. A pointed upper corner of the toenail (often created by improperly trimming by rounding the corner) that, as the nail grows, presses into the flesh or protrudes so that it may catch (“hang”) on stockings or shoes.

Questions about hangnails

What is hangnails the plural of?
Hangnails is the plural of hangnail.

Words near hangnails in the dictionary

  1. hangment
  2. hangments
  3. Hangnaameedhoo
  4. hangnail
  5. hangnailed
  6. hangnails
  7. hangnest
  8. hangnests
  9. hangout
  10. hangouts
  11. hangover

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hangnails (page history and authors); hangnail (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Wodencafe-hangnails.wav.

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