Meaning of hairshirt | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A shirt made of haircloth; especially one worn by ascetics or the penitent.
2. A state of penitence and humility.
   figuratively

Equivalents

Examples

“He is practically a total abstainer and I can affirm that he sleeps on a straw litter and eats the most Spartan food, cold dried grocer’s peas. He wears a hairshirt winter and summer and scourges himself every Saturday.”

“And when he went on to say, “The curse must be within ourselves,” Muir bequeathed us a hairshirt: the guilty conscience that plagues so many of us when we see what we are doing to the rest of nature.”

CEFR level