Hairstyle

How to spell hairstyle

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce hairstyle

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hairstyle mean?

1. nounA particular way in which a person's hair is cut, arranged, or styled.

Hairstyle in a sentence

• She booked a salon appointment to try a shorter hairstyle for summer.

• The actor changed his hairstyle completely for the new film role.

Where does hairstyle come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a modern English compound that joins two much older words. The first element, hair, descends from the Old English 'hær', a native Germanic word for the threadlike strands that grow from the skin, and it has cousins across the Germanic languages such as Dutch 'haar' and German 'Haar'. The second element, style, came into English from the Latin 'stilus', which originally named the pointed instrument used to write on wax tablets; over time 'style' shifted to mean a person's manner of writing and then, more broadly, a manner or fashion of doing anything. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as grooming and fashion vocabulary expanded, the two were welded together to mean a particular way of cutting and arranging the hair. Because both halves are familiar everyday words, the spelling is regular; the only thing to watch is keeping it as one solid word rather than splitting it into 'hair style'.

How the word is built

• hair (from Old English hær: hair)
• style (from Latin stilus: a writing instrument, later manner or fashion)