Parts of a Scissor – Blades, Pivot, Bows and a Hair Shear

All 12 parts on the diagram

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Household scissors 6

Blades Their sharpened edges slide against and past each other.
Handles Squeezing them together brings the blades together.
Pivot A screw or rivet joins the blades here. A screw can be adjusted; a rivet cannot.
Tip Also called the point. Some scissors are made with blunt ones.
Cutting edge The two edges meet and shear whatever is between them.
Bows The rings of the handles. Often one is small, for the thumb, and one large, for two or more fingers.

Haircutting shear 6

Moving blade A shear has one moving blade and one still blade.
Still blade It belongs to the half held by the ring finger.
Shank The index and middle fingers rest on the still blade's shank.
Finger grip The ring finger goes here. It is part of the still blade's half.
Thumb grip The thumb goes here and works the moving blade.
Finger brace A rest for the little finger, also called the tang. It gives more control.

How this list was compiled: Every name checked on 2026-09-30, a name kept only where two independent sources use it. Household scissors: Wikipedia, text only, Scissors, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scissors (blades, sharpened edges, pivot, handles, bows, tips); and How Products Are Made, volume 3, Scissors, http://www.madehow.com/Volume-3/Scissors.html (blades, handles, bows as the rings in the handles, the rivet or screw that joins the blades, tips and points, a small thumb hole and a larger finger hole on shears). Haircutting shear: S. C. Thorpe, Practice and Science of Standard Barbering, full text at https://archive.org/details/practiceandscien00thorrich (moving blade, still blade, pivot screw, cutting edges, shanks, finger grip, thumb grip, finger brace); Milady Standard Barbering, 6th edition, chapter 5 (the same names, with finger rest or tang for the brace, and which finger goes where); and Wikipedia, Hair-cutting shears, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hair-cutting_shears (finger brace or tang, finger rings, thumb ring). Hints and detail lines are in our own words. Licence: own work

The drawing: Drawn for this site on 2026-09-30 from plain geometry; no maker's scissors, nothing traced. Licence: own work

How it works

Household scissors have six named parts. The second drawing gives the parts of a shear, the haircutting kind, where each blade and each ring has a name of its own.

Read the full guide

Scissors first, then the shear

On the scissors, work from the tips back: tip, cutting edge, blade, pivot, handle, bow. On the shear, follow each half across the pivot. The upper ring, the finger grip, belongs to the lower blade, the still blade. The lower ring, the thumb grip, belongs to the upper blade, the moving blade. The hook behind the finger grip is the finger brace.

Handle and bow are easy to swap: the bow is only the ring, the handle is the whole half behind the pivot.

Questions and answers

What are the parts of scissors called?

Two blades, each with a cutting edge and a tip, joined at the pivot by a screw or rivet. Behind the pivot are the two handles, and the rings at their ends are the bows.

What are the finger holes on scissors called?

Bows. On many pairs one bow is small, for the thumb, and the other is larger, for two or more fingers. On a haircutting shear the rings are the finger grip and the thumb grip.

What is the hook on hair scissors for?

It is the finger brace, also called the tang or finger rest. The little finger rests on it, which gives more control of the shear.

Which blade moves on a haircutting shear?

The moving blade, worked by the thumb in the thumb grip. The still blade stays steady; its half carries the finger grip, where the ring finger goes.