HAIR SHIRT Synonyms: 56 Similar and Opposite Words

hair shirt

noun

as in headache

something that is a source of irritation the constant need to cut costs was a hair shirt, but one that the theater company had to live with

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Example Sentences

Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to show current usage. Read More Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

Recent Examples of hair shirt Four years later, an America-first cultural crackdown has freed the Met to cast off the hair shirt of reckoning and celebrate its diverse holdings in a spirit of defiance. —

Julian Lucas, New Yorker, 30 June 2025 In an area that used to produce influential Catholic churchmen the way the Dodgers churned out Rookies of the Year, Gomez has amounted to the living equivalent of a hair shirt: a mode of piety that serves no one but the wearer. —

Gustavo Arellano, Los Angeles Times, 19 June 2025 Erin Maglaque’s review of a new book on women and sound in Renaissance Italy peels back the layers of a less-talked about form of religious asceticism and control, one where there are no hair shirts or decade-long fasts, just… silence. —

Michelle Weber, Longreads, 15 Nov. 2024 Talking about wedding vows was like donning a hair shirt. —

Leslie Jamison, The New Yorker, 15 Jan. 2024 The novel aesthetic of Art Nouveau wrapped modernism in the garb of pleasure, instead of in the hair shirt of social obligation and moral uplift. —

Regina Cole, Forbes, 1 Jan. 2023 Few people’s utopia involves wearing a hair shirt and giving up culinary pleasures; utopia and sacrifice are, for many, antonyms. —

Jan Dutkiewicz, The New Republic, 20 Oct. 2022

Recent Examples of Synonyms for hair shirt

Noun

Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome causes fatigue, fever, muscle aches, abdominal problems, headaches, chills and dizziness in the early stages, and late symptoms include chest tightness, coughing, shortness of breath and lungs filling with fluid.

— Mary Whitfill Roeloffs, Forbes.com, 18 May 2026
And Malia is also achingly lonesome for her family life, with a sister about to get married and a doting father played, in this headache-inducingly twisty psychodrama’s most refreshing meta-twist, by Romanian director Radu Jude.

— Jessica Kiang, Variety, 18 May 2026