barrette

What it means

1. A clasp or clip for gathering and holding the hair.

   1 more example

   Growing sleepy, Rabbit stops before midnight at a roadside café for coffee. Somehow, though he can't put his finger on the difference, he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men sitting in zippered jackets in booths three to a girl, the girls with orange hair hanging like wiggly seaweed or loosely bound with gold barrettes like pirate treasure.

   1960, John Updike, 'Rabbit, Run', page 30

2. A bar used to mount medals of chivalric orders.
3. biologySynonym of katepimeron.

   Synonyms: katepimeron

In a sentence

The standing woman is overweight, with scraped-back and barretted bleach- blond hair and a jowly face of detonated capillaries.

2004, Glen Duncan, Death of an Ordinary Man, →ISBN

Where it comes from

1. Frenchbarrette
2. Englishbarrette

Borrowed from French barrette, from barre (“a bar”) + -ette, literally a small bar.