mustache
Americannoun
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mustaches
plural
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the hair growing on the upper lip
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such hair on men, allowed to grow without shaving, and often trimmed in any of various shapes.
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hairs or bristles growing near the mouth of an animal.
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a stripe of color, or elongated feathers, suggestive of a mustache on the side of the head of a bird.
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something resembling a mustache, as food or drink adhering to the upper lip.
a mustache of milk.
noun
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of mustache
1575–85; < Middle French moustache < Italian mostaccio; see mustachio
Explanation
A mustache is hair that grows between a person's nose and mouth. Some mustaches are as thin as a pencil line, while others are bushy and full. Salvador Dali was known for his long, curled mustache. If you're trying to grow a mustache, you might start by shaving all your facial hair except the strands that grow above your upper lip. When your mustache becomes luxuriant and ample, you can trim it with scissors and style it with mustache wax. The word mustache comes from the French moustache, which has a Greek root, mystax, "upper lip."
Vocabulary lists containing mustache
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:
He has a trim mustache and beard, yes, but the actor, who spends a significant portion of the play shirtless, has nary a hair on his sharply chiseled chest and big-gun biceps.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 8, 2026
There was something about the black clothes, the sword, the pencil mustache and mask over the eyes.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 6, 2026
I love just having a slightly fastidious hotel manager with a luxuriant mustache.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 22, 2026
And no one in the latter series wears a mustache.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 21, 2026
The detective on his case, Marie-François Goron, a man with a truly fabulous mustache, was convinced that Vernet was an alias.
From "The Mona Lisa Vanishes" by Nicholas Day
In something of an irony, Lotus’s historic approach to cornering and traction management—crossed up, tail out, mustaches ablaze—looks a lot like what the kids call drifting.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 25, 2026
Just that, bellowed in capital letters evoking images of very self-assured men sporting handlebar mustaches.
From Salon ● Jun. 19, 2025
Some of the women donned fake mustaches that mimicked Rome’s as they all toyed with possible explanations for what they had found.
From Science Magazine ● Jun. 6, 2024
The other amateur Thespians, wearing comic stick-on mustaches, moved to their marks, improvising a scene in a women’s beauty salon where one patron’s hair is accidentally dyed blue.
From New York Times ● Jun. 3, 2024
Their mustaches are patchy, and even though they look stern they're probably only a few years older than Katherine and me.
From "Dread Nation" by Justina Ireland
Definitions 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.
