Definition of "whisker" []

• The hair on a man's cheeks and chin. (noun)
• A single hair of a beard or mustache. (noun)
• One of the long stiff tactile bristles or hairs that grow near the mouth and elsewhere on the head of most mammals; a vibrissa. (noun)
• Informal A narrow margin; a hairsbreadth: The candidate lost the election by a whisker. (noun)
• Nautical One of two spars or booms projecting from the side of a bowsprit for spreading the jib or flying-jib guys. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "It rose slightly early in the month, then posted a severe dip (a result of one of those outlier polls) mid-month, down to a new all-time daily low of 44.2 percent (down a whisker from the 44.3 percent he posted two months ago)."
• "Each AMouse whisker is plugged directly into a capacitor microphone at the front of the robot."
• "All of this is a fairly roundabout way of saying that the cis woman feminist in question, by virtue of her outburst, seemed to position herself a mere cat’s whisker from the more obnoxious radfems that it has been my misfortune to meet online."