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hairy

   Also found in: Dictionary/thesaurus, Medical, Wikipedia, Hutchinson 0.03 sec.
1.hairy - Annoyingly complicated. "DWIM is incredibly hairy."
2.hairy - Incomprehensible. "DWIM is incredibly hairy."
3.hairy - Of people, high-powered, authoritative, rare, expert, and/or incomprehensible. Hard to explain except in context: "He knows this hairy lawyer who says there's nothing to worry about." See also hirsute.

The adjective "long-haired" is well-attested to have been in slang use among scientists and engineers during the early 1950s; it was equivalent to modern "hairy" and was very likely ancestral to the hackish use. In fact the noun "long-hair" was at the time used to describe a hairy person. Both senses probably passed out of use when long hair was adopted as a signature trait by the 1960s counterculture, leaving hackish "hairy" as a sort of stunted mutant relic.
4.(topology)hairy - hairy ball.


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His body was hairy like that of an ape, and his only clothing was a scarlet scarf twisted around his waist.
The Emerald City of Oz by Baum, L. Frank View in context
The roof is about twelve feet high, and runs to a pretty sharp angle, as if there were a regular ridge-pole there; while these ribbed, arched, hairy sides, present us with those wondrous, half vertical, scimetar-shaped slats of whale-bone, say three hundred on a side, which depending from the upper part of the head or crown bone, form those Venetian blinds which have elsewhere been cursorily mentioned.
Moby Dick LXVIII-CXXXIV by Melville, Herman View in context
It may be that he swept back into the past, and fell among the blood-drinking, hairy savages of the Age of Unpolished Stone; into the abysses of the Cretaceous Sea; or among the grotesque saurians, the huge reptilian brutes of the Jurassic times.
The Time Machine by Wells, H.G. View in context
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