What does dehair mean?
Dehair is a transitive verb meaning to remove hair from something, most commonly from the hides and skins of animals as part of the leather-making process. In tanning, hides arrive covered in hair that must be eliminated before the material can be softened and treated; this is typically achieved by soaking them in chemical solutions such as lime and sodium sulphide, which loosens the follicles so the hair can be scraped away, often with specialized dehairing machinery. The word is also applied in related trades, such as removing hair from pigs' carcasses or preparing furs and pelts. Dehair belongs to technical register: it appears in industry manuals, trade journals, and patent descriptions rather than casual speech. Its meaning is transparently built from the prefix de-, indicating removal, combined with hair, making it easy to decode even for readers encountering it for the first time.
verbTo remove hair from something, especially from animal hides or skins as part of leather processing.
- To remove hair from an animal hide or skin, typically during the preparation of leather.
"The tannery workers dehair the hides before they are soaked and tanned."
"Workers at the tannery use a lime-and-sulphide solution to loosen and then dehair each hide."
"The machine was designed to dehair pigskins quickly without damaging the underlying grain."
Every leather jacket you own started life as a hairy hide that had to be chemically dehaired first — a step so essential the machines that do it have their own name.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of dehair
Dehair is formed transparently within English from the prefix de- (indicating removal or reversal) plus the native noun hair, following a productive pattern seen in verbs like defrost and dethrone. It arose as a term of trade in the leather industry, with usage attested by the nineteenth century when mechanized tanning expanded. Because it is an English compound rather than a borrowed word, it has no true cognates in other languages, though it parallels formations such as French dépiler in describing hide preparation.
Related word forms
How dehair is actually used
Dehair is a technical term used chiefly in the leather, fur, and food-processing industries. It is almost always transitive, taking the hide or skin as its direct object, and appears mostly in professional or industrial contexts rather than everyday conversation.
Easily confused with dehair
Depilate refers specifically to removing hair from the human body (as with waxing or creams), while dehair is used mainly for animal hides and industrial processing.