Barrette
name, noun, verb ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A clasp or clip for gathering and holding the hair.
"Growing sleepy, Rabbit stops before midnight at a roadside café for coffee. Somehow, though he can't put his finger on the difference, he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men sitting in zippered jackets in booths three to a girl, the girls with orange hair hanging like wiggly seaweed or loosely bound with gold barrettes like pirate treasure."
- 2 a pin for holding women's hair in place wordnet
- 3 A bar used to mount medals of chivalric orders.
- 4 Synonym of katepimeron.
- 1 To put (hair) into a barrette. transitive
"The standing woman is overweight, with scraped-back and barretted bleach- blond hair and a jowly face of detonated capillaries."
- 1 A surname from French.
Example
More examples"Growing sleepy, Rabbit stops before midnight at a roadside café for coffee. Somehow, though he can't put his finger on the difference, he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men sitting in zippered jackets in booths three to a girl, the girls with orange hair hanging like wiggly seaweed or loosely bound with gold barrettes like pirate treasure."
Etymology
Borrowed from French barrette, from barre (“a bar”) + -ette, literally a small bar.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.