hair-raising

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.

Instead, he delivers his hair-raising message—that we’re staring at “a humiliating and bloody defeat” if we go to war with China—in a jaunty, clever and sometimes breathless book.

From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 16, 2026

For 15 hair-raising minutes, the pilots struggled to evade a half-dozen surface-to-air missiles, spraying countermeasures and executing a series of high-G maneuvers.

From The Wall Street Journal • Feb. 26, 2026

“Over the course of marrying and building a life and the hair-raising things we went through, Vinnie and I essentially endured a kind of war together,” says Palmer.

From Los Angeles Times • Sep. 16, 2025

Much of the Elon-related pseudo-news emerged from one of Trump’s hair-raising Oval Office encounters with a foreign leader, in this case newly-elected German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

From Salon • Jun. 8, 2025

So one thing I do not want is to live at a hair-raising distance from my job, assuming, of course, that I get a job.

From "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" by Barbara Ehrenreich