hoary
Americanadjective
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having grey or white hair
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white or whitish-grey in colour
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ancient or venerable
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of hoary
Explanation
Use the adjective hoary to describe something that is old and worn out — like the hoary jokes your great uncle Albert clings to. The word hoary can also be used to describe something that is white or gray with age. Santa is usually depicted with a hoary beard and hoary hair, although sometimes mall Santas have to fake this with wigs and artificial beards. Hoary can also mean covered with fine white hairs or with down — "The hoary leaves felt like velvet to the touch."
Vocabulary lists containing hoary
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100 SAT Words Beginning with "H"
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
On Monday he resurrected the hoary idea of suspending the 18.4-cent-a-gallon federal excise tax on gas.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 11, 2026
Lyrically, Kahan is reckoning with his newfound fame – without recycling hoary old clichés where "every hotel room looks the same" and "nobody understands the real me".
From BBC ● Apr. 25, 2026
But sometime over this last winter — that numbing, hoary stretch between mid-February and March — I decided this might be the year to reclaim a bit of seasonal delight.
From Salon ● Oct. 7, 2025
At its foundation, the movie is a hoary cliché with quirk spackled on it.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 27, 2025
Great ilexes of huge girth stood dark and solemn in wide glades with here and there among them hoary ash-trees, and giant oaks just putting out their brown-green buds.
From "The Two Towers" by J. R. R. Tolkien
Since the turn of the century, three paths have emerged for washed-up stars, displacing hoarier options like “Hollywood Squares.”
From The New Yorker ● Sep. 2, 2019
Without a bona fide star role like Lilli, though, you might be hard-pressed to put up with some of the hoarier aspects of “Kiss Me, Kate’s” sexual politics, in Sam and Bella Spewack’s book.
From Washington Post ● Mar. 14, 2019
Unfortunately, Mr. Urban’s play is far hoarier than Mr. Lucas’s delicate, moving romantic fantasy.
From New York Times ● Feb. 18, 2014
Perhaps inevitably, “One Arm” is sketchier and hoarier than either of those works.
From New York Times ● Jun. 10, 2011
The stars of the past and the beacons are paling, The heavens and the waters are hoarier of hue: But the heart in us chants not an all unavailing Farewell and adieu.
From A Century of Roundels by Algernon Charles Swinburne
But this time, in a series of meetings on Tuesday, the Republican lawmakers brushed him off, shrugged that the romance was over, then tacked on that hoariest of evasions: It’s not you, it’s us.
From Slate ● Dec. 13, 2023
With “Elvis,” Luhrmann matches Presley’s drive and instinctive charisma and raises him for sheer nerve, simultaneously hewing to the hoariest conventions of Hollywood rise-and-fall biopics and seeking to gleefully subvert them at every turn.
From Washington Post ● Jun. 22, 2022
“Mrs. America” paints its leading lady not as a villain but a plausible female version of that hoariest of contemporary TV conventions: the antihero.
From New York Times ● Apr. 10, 2020
This is the film’s hoariest plot device, but it does serve a purpose in getting Ben to grow up.
From Salon ● Jun. 14, 2019
And long hours they talked together,—strong youth and hoariest age; and each was glad that in the other he had found some source of hope and comfort.
From The Story of Siegfried by James Baldwin
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Get a wordDefinitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
