Hairy

5 definitions found

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:

  Hairy \Hair"y\ (-[y^]), a.
     1. Bearing or covered with hair; made of or resembling hair;
        rough with hair; hirsute.
        [1913 Webster]
  
              His mantle hairy, and his bonnet sedge. --Milton.


        [1913 Webster]
  
     2. Very complicated, difficult, or involved; as, a hairy
        problem; a hairy equation. [Colloq.]
        [PJC]
  
     3. Dangerous or frightening; as, a hairy encounter with a
        mugger.
        [PJC]

From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:

  hairy
       adj 1: having or covered with hair; "Jacob was a hairy man"; "a
              hairy caterpillar" [syn: {hirsute}] [ant: {hairless}]
       2: hazardous and frightening; "hairy moments in the mountains"
       [also: {hairiest}, {hairier}]

From Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 [moby-thes]:

  145 Moby Thesaurus words for "hairy":
     Herculean, abstruse, arduous, asperous, barbellate, barfy, bearded,
     bewhiskered, bristled, bristling, bristly, brutal, bum, bushy,
     capillary, chancy, cheesy, cirrose, cirrous, comate, complex,
     complicated, confused, confusing, craggy, crappy, creepy, critical,
     crummy, dangerous, delicate, demanding, difficile, difficult,
     dirty, downy, exacting, fibered, fibroid, fibrous, flagelliform,
     fleecy, flocculent, flossy, fluffy, formidable, frightening,
     fringy, funicular, furry, fuzzy, glochidiate, godawful, goshawful,
     gossamery, grim, hairlike, hard, hard-earned, hard-fought, harsh,
     hazardous, hirsute, hispid, icky, intricate, jagged, jawbreaking,
     jeopardous, knotted, knotty, laborious, lanate, ligamental, matted,
     mean, nappy, nerve-racking, no picnic, not easy, operose, perilous,
     pilose, precarious, problematic, pubescent, punk, putrid, rigorous,
     risky, ropy, rough, rugged, scabrous, scary, scraggy,
     set with thorns, setaceous, setose, setous, severe, shagged,
     shaggy, shitty, silky, spiny, steep, stinking, stinky, strenuous,
     strigal, strigate, strigose, stringy, stubbled, stubbly, studded,
     taeniate, taeniform, tangled, thorny, threadlike, thready,
     ticklish, toilsome, tough, treacherous, trichoid, tricky, tufted,
     uncertain, uneven, unhealthy, unshaven, unshorn, unsmooth, unsound,
     uphill, vomity, whiskered, wicked, wiry, woolly, worrying,
     yecchy
  
  

From Jargon File (4.3.1, 29 Jun 2001) [jargon]:

  hairy adj. 1. Annoyingly complicated. "{DWIM} is incredibly hairy." 2.
     Incomprehensible. "{DWIM} is incredibly hairy." 3. 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}.
  
     There is a theorem in simplicial homology theory which states that any
     continuous tangent field on a 2-sphere is null at least in a point.
     Mathematically literate hackers tend to associate the term `hairy' with
     the informal version of this theorem; "You can't comb a hairy ball
     smooth." (Previous versions of this entry associating the above informal
     statement with the Brouwer fixed-point theorem were incorrect.)
  
     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' senses 1 and 2, and was very likely ancestral to the
     hackish use. In fact the noun `long-hair' was at the time used to
     describe a person satisfying sense 3. 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.
  
     In British mainstream use, "hairy" means "dangerous", and
     consequently, in British programming terms, "hairy" may be used to
     denote complicated and/or incomprehensible code, but only if that
     complexity or incomprehesiveness is also considered dangerous.
  
  

From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (27 SEP 03) [foldoc]:

  hairy
       
          1. Annoyingly complicated.  "{DWIM} is incredibly hairy."
       
          2. Incomprehensible.  "{DWIM} is incredibly hairy."
       
          3. 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.  {hairy ball}.
       
          [{Jargon File}]
       
          (2001-03-29)