Other forms: wigs
A wig is artificial hair worn over your own. Wear a wig, a grey wig, the wig slipped.
It covers everything from a medical wig worn after treatment to the ceremonial wigs still worn by British barristers and judges. Toupee means a small one covering a bald patch, and hairpiece is the neutral general term. Note the verb wig out, meaning to lose control emotionally, which is American slang and unrelated in feel, and bigwig, meaning an important person, which comes from the enormous wigs worn by the powerful in the eighteenth century.
1nounwigArtificial hair worn on the head.
“The wig was better than anybody expected.”
wig is artificial hair.
Wig is a shortening of periwig, which is English's mangling of French perruque. The word has lost its first two syllables and its foreign shape, and bigwig preserves the era when the size of the thing announced the importance of the wearer.
French
perruque
English, today
wig
a clipping of periwig, itself an alteration of French perruque. The meaning of "to reprimand" perhaps came from this being something a bigwig would do or perhaps from the expressions to flip one's wig, wigs on the green, or dash my wig!
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA