curlies
- 1Coiled, springy locks of hair that twist into curls rather than falling straight.
Like ribbon dragged across a scissor blade, springing back into tight coils.
The humidity turned her smooth blowout back into a mass of curlies.
He ran a comb through his curlies and gave up almost immediately.
- 2A slang term for the hair that grows around a person's genitals.
The nurse explained that the curlies would need to be shaved before the procedure.
Locker-room talk soon drifted to jokes about graying curlies.
Similarpubes
Note
Slang that narrows the everyday word for curls to the hair of the groin, and like its broader sibling it is used only in the plural. The tone is jocular, and the word trades on the coiled texture of that hair, as in a grumble about something getting caught on your curlies. Keep it to casual talk. In medical or formal writing, pubic hair is the word to use.
- 3The bracket symbols { and }, used to group statements in code or elements in a set.
The linter flagged a block where the curlies didn't match up.
She wrapped the loop body in curlies to keep both statements together.
Similarbraces
Note
Programmers' shorthand for curly brackets, at home in code reviews and chat rather than in specifications. Martin Fowler uses it in UML Distilled (2004), setting curlies against guillemets, the « » marks, and admitting it is never quite clear which of the two a UML keyword such as {abstract} belongs in. In formal documentation, spell it out as curly brackets.
- 4Quotation marks with a curved, directional shape that differ from the upright marks produced by a typewriter.
The typesetter insisted on curlies throughout the printed edition.
A quick search-and-replace swapped the straight quotation marks around every line of dialogue for curlies.
Note
Software talk pairs it with its opposite. Woody Leonhard's The Underground Guide to Word for Windows (1994) recommends a short macro to change all curlies to straights. The word is informal and plural-only, so you speak of curlies, never a curly. Among programmers it can just as easily mean curly brackets, and only the context tells you whether braces or quotation marks are meant.
Practice
Can you tell the meanings of curlies apart? Answer 3 quick questions from this page, or write your own sentence and AI will check it.