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wig

Pronunciation: /wɪɡ/

The English word “wig” has 8 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. A head of real or synthetic hair worn on the head to disguise baldness, for cultural or religious reasons, for fashion, or by actors to help them better resemble the character they are portraying.
  2. A bigwig.
  3. An old seal.

verb

  1. To put on a wig; to provide with a wig (especially of an actor etc.).
  2. To upbraid, reprimand.
  3. To act in an extremely emotional way; to be overly excited, irritable, nervous, or fearful; behave erratically.
  4. To shoot in the head.

interjection

  1. An expression of shock.

Etymology

Clipping of periwig, itself an alteration of French perruque. The meaning of "to reprimand" perhaps came from this being something a bigwig would do or perhaps from the expressions to flip one's wig, wigs on the green, or dash my wig!

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.