Hairline

How to spell hairline

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce hairline

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hairline mean?

1. nounThe line along the forehead and temples where the hair begins to grow.
2. nounAn extremely thin line, mark, or crack, as fine as a single hair.

Hairline in a sentence

• He noticed his hairline slowly receding in his forties.

• The x-ray revealed a hairline fracture in his wrist.

• The barber trimmed the edges to give him a sharp, even hairline.

• A faint hairline ran across the surface of the antique vase.

Where does hairline come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound formed from two very old native words. 'Hair' descends from the Old English 'hēr', which named the fine strands growing from the skin and is related to similar words across the Germanic languages. 'Line' came into Old English as 'līne', meaning a cord, rope, or row, ultimately from the Latin 'linea', a thread made of flax (Latin 'linum' meaning flax), and was reinforced by Old French usage. Joined together, 'hairline' literally means a line as thin as a single hair, and the earliest recorded uses describe both the edge where the hair meets the forehead and any extremely fine mark or crack. Because both parts are plain everyday words, the spelling is regular, though writers sometimes pause over whether to write it as one word, two words, or hyphenated; the standard modern form is the single closed compound 'hairline'.

How the word is built

• hair (the strands growing from the scalp)
• line (a thin mark or boundary)