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Definition
having or covered with hairespecially:
- a person on the body or face
- a plant or plant part covered with stiff hairs
- The hirsute backpacker was eager for a shave.
- For most of its 4,500 years, the Great Sphinx stood guard over the pyramids of Giza from behind a 14-ft. limestone beard. Now, centuries after unknown forces gave the enigmatic monument a shave, some Egyptian authorities want to restore the Sphinx to its former hirsute splendor.http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,952299,00.html (retrieved 10/20/09)
- She wants to know what is causing her excessive hirsuteness.
- ...dropped the little hand out of his great hirsute paw...William Makepeace Thackeray -- Vanity Fair
- ...the homely hirsute specter had already vanished...Joseph Heller -- Catch 22
- Only five feet tall and very hirsute, he dyed his hair and whiskers a mossy green.George R.R. Martin -- A Dance With Dragons
- You're a senior now" Mark picked me up again and crushed me against his powerful, hirsute chest.Pat Conroy -- The Lords of Discipline
- It hurt like this until shortly before 10 P.M., when a rather fat, hirsute guy of Lebanese descent burst into Colin's room without knocking.John Green -- An Abundance of Katherines
- Amory noticed that he was inclined to stare straight at the back of the chauffeur's head as if speculating steadily but hopelessly some baffling hirsute problem.F. Scott Fitzgerald -- This Side of Paradise
- Honestly, Clary thought, it was hardly fair for a werewolf to be curvy and pretty; she ought to be big and hirsute, possibly with hair coming out of her ears.Cassandra Clare -- City of Ashes
- All hairless peoples sometimes wear clothing and all peoples no matter how hirsute wear ornaments—but nakedness taboo is found only where flesh is merchandise to be packaged or displayed .... that is to say, on Earth.Robert A. Heinlein -- Glory Road
- When Amelia stepped forward to salute him, which she always did with great trembling and timidity, he gave a surly grunt of recognition, and dropped the little hand out of his great hirsute paw without any attempt to hold it there.William Makepeace Thackeray -- Vanity Fair
- 'I give my word,' the chaplain pleaded, but it was too late, for the homely hirsute specter had already vanished, dissolving so expertly inside the blooming, dappled, fragmented malformations of leaves, light and shadows that the chaplain was already doubting that he had even been there.Joseph Heller -- Catch-22
- Schomberg, the keeper of the hotel where he boarded, a hirsute Alsatian of manly bearing and an irrepressible retailer of all the scandalous gossip of the place, would, with both elbows on the table, impart an adorned version of the story to any guest who cared to imbibe knowledge along with the more costly liquors.Joseph Conrad -- Lord Jim
- I don't mean non-humans or hirsute humans; clothes are not for them.Robert A. Heinlein -- Glory Road
- Before them marched the clansmen from the hills; chiefs and champions astride shaggy garrons, their hirsute fighters trotting beside them, clad in furs and boiled leather and old mail.George R.R. Martin -- A Dance With Dragons
- ...synchronous discoveries of Galileo, Simon Marius, Piazzi, Le Verrier, Herschel, Galle: the systematisations attempted by Bode and Kepler of cubes of distances and squares of times of revolution: the almost infinite compressibility of hirsute comets and their vast elliptical egressive and reentrant orbits from perihelion to aphelion: the sidereal origin of meteoric stones: the Libyan floods on Mars about the period of the birth of the younger astroscopist: the annual recurrence...James Joyce -- Ulysses
- ...withdrawn to muse and meditate in some deep recess, Far from the clank of crowds intervals passing rapt and happy, Aware of the fresh free giver the flowing Missouri, aware of mighty Niagara, Aware of the buffalo herds grazing the plains, the hirsute and strong-breasted bull, Of earth, rocks, Fifth-month flowers experienced, stars, rain, snow, my amaze, Having studied the mocking-bird's tones and the flight of the mountain-hawk, And heard at dawn the unrivall'd one, the hermit thrush...Walt Whitman -- Leaves of Grass
(Editor's note: The suffix "-ness" converts an adjective to a noun that means state or degree of. This is the same pattern you see in words like darkness, kindness, and coolness.)