wiry
/ˈwʌɪəri
/adjective (wirier, wiriest)
1Resembling wire in form and texture: his wiry black hair...
- He had long, wiry black hair, and a bristly goatee-beard-mustache combination around his lower face.
- She settled into her bedroll and ran a slender hand through the mass of wiry black hair atop her head, pulling it back into a ponytail.
- His dark eyes sparkled with life and amusement from the mass of black wiry hair that covered his face.
Synonyms
coarse, rough, stiff, tough, strong;
curly, wavy
1.1(Of a person) lean, tough, and sinewy: Bernadette was a small, wiry woman...
- I turned around to face him, doing everything I could not to gawk at his lean, wiry figure.
- A thin wiry man was sitting at the counter, downing a bottle of beer.
- He was a small, spare, wiry man, highly intelligent, with unusual gifts of persuasion and leadership.
Synonyms
sinewy, strong, tough, athletic;
lean, spare, thin, stringy, skinny
literary thewy
Derivatives
wirily
- Yet he only smiled wirily, and handed me the bike.
- He is wirily built, with deep, twinkling blue eyes and a shimmering midnight blue robe.
wiriness
- The Englishman, also 22 years of age, seemed broader, taller, his muscles more pronounced and his expression meaner, next to Simpson's pallid wiriness.
- But there was a residual wiriness, as he sat, a strength remaining from a lifetime of vigorous activity in nature.
- The texture of abandoned fields and fencerows is imparted mainly by the cluttered verticality of grassblades, and the scrawny wiriness of tough-stemmed, small-leafed weeds.