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Elfin
Definitions
- 1 Of or relating to elves.
"The Elf-bolt is associated with many rustic fancies not yet altogether eradicated from the popular mind. It occupied no unimportant part among the paraphernalia of Scottish witches of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and the occurrence of any sudden disease amongst cattle was ascribed until a comparatively recent period, to their having been shot by the fairies with Elfin arrows."
- 2 Resembling an elf or elves, especially in tiny size or features.
"She was one of those elfin, rather precocious little girls, quick coloured, with dark hair, naturally curling dusky hair that was sometimes astray over her eyes, and eyes that were sometimes impishly dark, and sometimes a clear brown yellow."
- 1 small and delicate wordnet
- 2 suggestive of an elf in strangeness and otherworldliness wordnet
- 3 usually good-naturedly mischievous wordnet
- 4 relating to or made or done by or as if by an elf wordnet
- 1 An elf; an inhabitant of fairy-land.
"It was quite an expedition that Ida met, a kind of elfin's rout it looked in the moonlight, children and animals and a fairy-like presence with a face like a moon-lily, all scampering and squealing and whoofing and miauling in a merry game they were making of their progress."
- 2 A little urchin or child.
- 3 Any of the butterflies in the subgenus Incisalia of the North American lycaenid genus Callophrys.
Etymology
From Middle English elven, from Old English elfen, ælfen (“nymph, spirit, fairy”), feminine of elf, ælf (“elf”), equivalent to elf + -in. Cognate with Middle High German elbinne (“a fairy, nymph”).
Partly from attributive use of Etymology 1, but reanalysed by Edmund Spenser as if equivalent to elf + -in. Compare elven (adjective), elvan.
See also for "elfin"
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