Word.ws English Dictionary

have someone by the short hairs

have someone by the short hairs verb: to have someone in a difficult situation in which he or she is without alternatives and can be controlled.

Verb

have someone by the short hairs (third-person singular simple present has someone by the short hairs, present participle having someone by the short hairs, simple past and past participle had someone by the short hairs)

  1. (idiomatic) To have someone in a difficult situation in which he or she is without alternatives and can be controlled.
    • Beginning with a curt “Listen, Buster,” she proceeded to sketch out with admirable clearness the salient points in the situation as she envisaged it, and judging from the loud buzzing noises that came over the wire, clearly audible to me though now standing in the background, it was evident that...1960, P[elham] G[renville] Wodehouse, chapter XIX, in Jeeves in the Offing, London: Herbert Jenkins, →OCLC
    • The Saudis know that as long as we consume 7 billion barrels per year (4 billion of them imported from abroad), they have us by the short hairs.2002 June 7, Martin Peretz, “Power Trip”, in The New Republic, retrieved 16 Oct 2007

Synonyms of have someone by the short hairs

Forms of have someone by the short hairs

third-person singular presenthas someone by the short hairs
present participlehaving someone by the short hairs
past participlehad someone by the short hairs
pasthad someone by the short hairs

Questions about have someone by the short hairs

What does have someone by the short hairs mean?
Have someone by the short hairs means to have someone in a difficult situation in which he or she is without alternatives and can be controlled.
What part of speech is have someone by the short hairs?
Have someone by the short hairs is a verb.
What is the past tense of have someone by the short hairs?
The past tense of have someone by the short hairs is had someone by the short hairs.

Words near have someone by the short hairs in the dictionary

  1. have sex
  2. have sexual relations
  3. have shit on
  4. have someone by the balls
  5. have someone by the short and curlies
  6. have someone by the short hairs
  7. have someone going
  8. have someone on toast
  9. have someone there
  10. have someone to rights
  11. have someone's back

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: have someone by the short hairs (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-have someone by the short hairs.ogg.

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