hangnail

Hangnail is an alteration of an earlier word angnail (or agnail), which did not at first mean what we now call a hangnail. The Old English ancestor of the word was angnægl, “corn on the foot,” with the second part, nægl, referring not to a toenail but rather to the nail we drive in with a hammer, the head of an iron nail being likened to a hard corn. By the 1500s the association of -nail with the body's nails led to a new sense for angnail, “sore around a fingernail or toenail.” In the next century, ang- was altered to hang-, and the main sense came to be “bit of loose skin at the side or root of a fingernail.”