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Glite Dictionary
hide nor hair

hide nor hair

5 8.6
No sign of a person or thing
  • idiom
  • Archaic
translation icon : ni rastro
  • I haven't seen hide nor hair of you for weeks.
  • see hide nor hair

Examples

  • I had not seen hide nor hair of Mama's people since I was a little bitty girl.

    Fiction book (1990)

  • I've been looking for him all day and can't turn up hide nor hair.

    Fiction book (1990)

  • And no one has seen hide nor hair of her.

    The Last Sin Eater (2007)

  • Neither hide nor hair of him was ever heard of or seen since.

    St Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold (2009)

  • Never saw hide nor hair of him.

    Summer Stock (1950)

  • I see neither hide nor hair of the tenant during his week of grace.

    Fiction book (2002)

  • Nobody's seen hide nor hair of him since.

    Lone Star (1996)

  • We made our collection at Roderick's place, and that was the last anyone saw hide nor hair of him.

    Fiction book (1996)

  • We've been all over the back roads and we haven't seen hide nor hair of him.

    Joshua Tree (1993)

  • Nobody has seen hide nor hair of him since he left town.

Antonyms

trace
492 3.3

A small sign that something was there

presence
108 4.9

A feeling that someone or something is in a place

Surface Forms

hide nor hair singular
hide nor hairs plural

Morphology

hide + nor + hair

The constituents 'hide' and 'hair' are physical traces, so a learner can partially infer that 'hide nor hair' means 'no trace' by understanding it as 'not even a hide or a hair.' However, the formulaic use of 'nor' and the fixed idiomatic wording are somewhat archaic and non-compositional, so the exact negative idiomatic meaning is not fully predictable without prior exposure.

Etymology

Hide nor hair may come from old hunting language. If hunters could not find an animal's hide or hair, there was literally no sign of it, so the phrase means 'no trace' or 'no sign' today.