Word.ws English Dictionary

pompadour

/ˈpɒmpədʊə/US/ˈpɑːmpədɔːɹ/

pompadour noun: a women's hairstyle in which the hair is swept upwards from the face and worn high over the forehead.

Noun

pompadour (plural pompadours)

  1. A women's hairstyle in which the hair is swept upwards from the face and worn high over the forehead.
  2. A men's hairstyle of the 1950s.
    • Squat and perspiring, with a low pompadour and a thin black mustache, he was inevitably disheveled by evening.2019, Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys, Fleet, page 17
    • The Donald's strange pompadour and Hillary's strange server have eclipsed all the usual primary permutations.2015 August 22, Maureen Dowd, “Donald Trump Struts in His Own Pageant”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 22 Aug 2015
    Synonyms:
    do, ducktail, quiff
  3. A crimson or pink colour.
    • […] head, neck, and whole under parts fine but very deep crimson or pompadour-colour […]1812, George Shaw, James Francis Stephens, General Zoology: pt. 1. Aves, page 409
  4. A corsage with low square neck.
  5. A pattern for silk, with leaves and flowers in pink, blue, and gold.
  6. (UK, historical, slang) A member of the 56th (West Essex) Regiment of Foot, an infantry regiment in the British Army, active from 1755 to 1881.

Verb

pompadour (third-person singular simple present pompadours, present participle pompadouring, simple past and past participle pompadoured)

  1. To style hair into a pompadour
    • But by mid-afternoon we had both grown tired of putting on and taking off the clothes my mother and Beata had made for Lillian Russell, and of taking down and pompadouring again the wig Beata had turned backside front so it should be long where ladies' hair was supposed to be long.1944, Skulda V. Banér, Latchstring Out, page 33
    • I parted my hair back and smoothed it instead of pompadouring it.1976-1977, Lou Sullivan, personal diary, quoted in 2019, Ellis Martin, Zach Ozma (editors), We Both Laughed In Pleasure

Synonyms of pompadour

Forms of pompadour

Noun
pluralpompadours
alternative form (nonstandard)pompador
Verb
third-person singular presentpompadours
present participlepompadouring
past participlepompadoured
pastpompadoured

Origin of pompadour

From French Pompadour, after Madame de Pompadour (1721–1764), mistress of Louis XV.

Words formed from pompadour

Phrases with pompadour

Questions about pompadour

What does pompadour mean?
Pompadour means a women's hairstyle in which the hair is swept upwards from the face and worn high over the forehead.
What part of speech is pompadour?
Pompadour can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce pompadour?
Pompadour is pronounced /ˈpɒmpədʊə/ (UK).
What is the plural of pompadour?
The plural of pompadour is pompadours.

Words near pompadour in the dictionary

  1. Pompa
  2. pompadom
  3. pompadoms
  4. pompador
  5. pompadors
  6. pompadour
  7. pompadour fish
  8. pompadour fishes
  9. pompadoured
  10. pompadouring
  11. pompadours

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pompadour (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)-Vealhurl-pompadour.wav, LL-Q1860 (eng)-Typheuss-pompadour.wav.

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