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A loose narrow strip of skin near the base of a fingernail
Answer for the clue "A loose narrow strip of skin near the base of a fingernail ", 8 letters:
hangnail
Alternative clues for the word hangnail
Word definitions for hangnail in dictionaries
Wiktionary
Word definitions in Wiktionary
n. 1 A loose, narrow strip of nail tissue protruding from the side edge and anchored near the base of a fingernail or toenail. 2 A pointed upper corner of the toenail (often created by improperly trimming by rounding the corner) that, as the nail grows, ...
WordNet
Word definitions in WordNet
n. a loose narrow strip of skin near the base of a fingernail; tearing it produces a painful sore that is easily infected [syn: agnail ]
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Word definitions in The Collaborative International Dictionary
Hangnail \Hang"nail`\ (-n[=a]l`), n. [A corruption of agnail.] A small piece or sliver of skin which hangs loose, near the root of a finger nail. --Holloway.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Word definitions in Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
also hang-nail , 1670s, apparently from hang (v.) + (finger) nail , but probably folk etymology from Old English agnail "a corn on the foot, painful spike (in the flesh)" from Proto-Germanic *ang- "compressed, hard, painful" (from PIE *angh- "tight, painfully ...
Usage examples of hangnail.
There was a way in which she isolated a digit for sharp regard, using a magnifier and a square of dark cardboard, and there were hangnails flying and shreds and grains of dead skin and fragments of nail, scintillas, springing in the air.
Alex muttered, chewing a hangnail, aware that with every second that passed their window of opportunity was closing.
Loved her brother despite him, loved not only him but loved in him that bitter prophet and inflexible corruptless judge of what he considered the family's honor and its doom, as he thought he loved but really hated in her what he considered the frail doomed vessel of its pride and the foul instrument of its disgrace, not only this, she loved him not only in spite of but because of the fact that he himself was incapable of love, accepting the fact that he must value above all not her but the virginity of which she was custodian and on which she placed no value whatever: the frail physical stricture which to her was no more than a hangnail would have been.
Pyanfar sat and gnawed her mustaches, gnawed a hangnail on her third finger.
He wasn't quite sure what placenta praevia was, but somehow he didn't think it was medical gobbledy-gook for a hangnail.
Branson, being left-handed, had been trying awkwardly to snip off a hangnail on the middle finger of his left hand.