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Hangnail is altered by folk etymology from angnail or agnail, which originally did not correspond to what we now know as “hangnail.” In Old English angnægl meant “corn on the foot,” with the element nægl referring not to a fingernail but rather the nail we drive in with a hammer, with the head of an iron nail being likened to a hard corn. By the 16th century, the association of -nail with the body’s nails led to a new sense, “an inflammation around a finger- or toenail.” The first element, ang- or ag-, which is akin to Old English enge, “painful,” was no longer understandable. Some speakers altered it to hang-, so that the dominant sense of both hangnail and agnail came to be “loose skin at the root of a fingernail.”
Examples of hangnail in a Sentence
Julia Calderone, New York Times, 31 Dec. 2024
Either way, hangnails and dry fingertips will be a thing of the past with these hyper-hydrating cuticle-care products.
—Angela Trakoshis, Allure, 6 Dec. 2024
Caravans of cars traveled from Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Virginia and Ohio to clinics here, loading up on pills and prescriptions from crooked doctors selling their prescription pads to anyone with so much as a hangnail.
—Pat Beall, Sun Sentinel, 29 Nov. 2024
This is a chronic hangnail infection that damages fingernails or toenails.
—Mark Gurarie, Health, 9 Oct. 2024
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Cite this Entry
“Hangnail.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hangnail. Accessed 1 Mar. 2025.
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hangnail
noun
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