hairy

5 definitions found

hairy - Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 :

  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]

hairy - WordNet (r) 2.1 (2005) :

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

hairy - Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (26 May 2007) :

  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. <topology> hairy ball.
  
     [Jargon File]
  
     (2001-03-29)
  

hairy - Jargon File (4.4.4, 14 Aug 2003) :

  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.
  

hairy - Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 :

  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