Other forms: hairs
Hair is what grows on your head and on your skin. Wash your hair, long hair, get your hair cut.
It is uncountable when it means the whole mass — her hair is grey — and countable for individual strands: there is a hair in my soup. Hairdresser, hairbrush, hairline and hairpin are the standard compounds. The idioms are many: split hairs, meaning to argue over trivial distinctions; let your hair down; not turn a hair; and a hair's breadth, meaning a tiny margin.
1nounhairThe mass of fine strands growing on the head.~91%
“Her hair went completely grey in about two years.”
2nounsingleA single such strand.~9%
“There was one hair on the collar and it started an argument.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 11 sentences found in the wild and placed 11 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
hair is a body covering.
Old English haer is Germanic and probably related to a root meaning to comb or scrape. The Latin word was pilus, which gives English depilatory and pile, the surface of a carpet.
Middle English
her
English, today
hair
From Middle English her. From Middle English her, heer, hær, from Old English hǣr, from Proto-West Germanic hār, from Proto-Germanic hērą (“hair”), from Proto-Indo-European kes- (“to scrape, comb”). Cognate with stq Hier, Híer (“hair”), West Frisian hier (“hair”), cim haar, har (“hair”), Dutch haar (“hair”), German - and Low German Haar (“hair”), lb Hoer (“hair”), mhn hor (“hair”), Yiddish האָר (“hair”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish hår (“hair”), Faroese and Icelandic hár (“hair”). Eclipsed non-native Middle English cheveler, chevelere (“hair”), borrowed from Old French chevelëure (“hair, head-hair, coiffure, wig”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA