Hobbit
noun, slang ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 A member of a fictional race of small humanoids with shaggy hair and hairy feet.
"It was his thirty-third birthday and already he had […] a little round tummy like a hobbit"
- 2 A Welsh unit of weight, equal to four Welsh pecks, or 168 pounds.
- 3 an imaginary being similar to a person but smaller and with hairy feet; invented by J.R.R. Tolkien wordnet
- 4 A member of a fictional race of small humanoids with shaggy hair and hairy feet.; A person of short stature. humorous
- 5 An old unit of volume (2+¹⁄₂ bushels, the volume of 168 pounds of wheat). archaic
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- 6 An extinct species of hominin, Homo floresiensis, with a short body and relatively small brain, fossils of which have been recovered from the Indonesian island of Flores.
"Although partial remains of other Hobbits have surfaced at the same site, they say it could have been an isolated colony of inbred people who shared the same genetic abnormalities."
- 7 A socially unappealing, overly academic student. US, slang, uncommon
Synonyms
All synonymsExample
More examples"Sauron wants every hobbit to fear him."
Etymology
Coined in its current sense by J. R. R. Tolkien in the 1930s, featured in the novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Jocularly etymologized by him as from a hypothetical Old English *holbytla (literally “hole-builder”), from hol (“hole”) + bytlan (“to build”) + -a (“-er”). Tolkien was possibly influenced by similar terms for house-sprites (probably from Hob, a hypocoristic form of Robert), or an isolated mention of hobbits (with hobgoblins following immediately afterwards) in a list of sprites and bogies from the 19th-century Denham Tracts.
Probably from hoppet, hobbet (“basket”).
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.