English

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Etymology

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From hairy +‎ -ness.

Noun

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hairiness (countable and uncountable, plural hairinesses)

  1. The characteristic of being hairy.
    • 1665, Robert Hooke, Micrographia, Observ. XXVI, [1]
      We have had (says he) another of this kind brought us out of the East-Indies, which being planted was in shew like the former, but came not to perfection, the unkindly season not suffering it to shew the flower; but of the Cods that were brought, some were smaller, shorter, and rounder then the Garden kind; others much longer, and many growing together, as it were in clusters, and cover'd all over with a brown short hairiness, so fine, that if any of it be rubb'd, or fall on the back of ones hand, or other tender parts of the skin, it will cause a kind of itching []
    • 1726 October 28, [Jonathan Swift], Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. [] [Gulliver’s Travels], volume II, London: [] Benj[amin] Motte, [], →OCLC, part IV (A Voyage to the Houyhnhnms):
      The fore-feet of the Yahoo differed from my hands in nothing else but the length of the nails, the coarseness and brownness of the palms, and the hairiness on the backs.
    • 1804, William Robert Broughton, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean[2], London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, Book I, p. 92, footnote:
      Spanberg, the Russian navigator, landed, he says, in a great island from 43° to 50° lat., speaks of the uncommon hairiness of the natives, and of their wearing of silver in their ears.
    • 1942, Emily Carr, “Singing”, in The Book of Small, Toronto, Ont.: Oxford University Press, →OCLC:
      Small reddened but said stubbornly, “The cow likes my singing.” ¶ Cows are different from humans; perhaps the hairiness of their ears strains sound.
  2. (technical) A characteristic of yarn: the proportion of fibre ends that stick out and are not embedded in the yarn body.[3]
    • 1978, Ahmedabad Textile Industry's Research Association, Proceedings of the Technological Conference[4], page 91:
      There was a reduction in hairiness of yarn after warping by about 17% in comparison to the hairiness of the wound yarn.

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