hair shirt

1. 1.

   an uncomfortable shirt made of coarse animal hair; worn next to the skin as a penance

   Broadershirt

Questions about hair shirt

What does hair shirt mean?

hair shirt means "an uncomfortable shirt made of coarse animal hair; worn next to the skin as a penance".

Is hair shirt a common word?

hair shirt is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.