Toxophilite
adj, noun ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Someone keen on or an expert at archery; a lover or practitioner of archery.
"Here the gardens of the place encroached with a somewhat wide sweep upon the paddock, and gave ample room for the doings of the toxophilites. Miss Thorne got together such daughters of Diana as could bend a bow, and marshalled them to the targets."
- 1 Pertaining to archery.
"What causes them to labour at pianoforte sonatas, and to learn four songs from a fashionable master at a guinea a lesson, and to play the harp if they have handsome arms and neat elbows, and to wear Lincoln Green toxophilite hats and feathers, but that they may bring down some "desirable" young man with those killing bows and arrows of theirs?"
Example
More examples"What causes them to labour at pianoforte sonatas, and to learn four songs from a fashionable master at a guinea a lesson, and to play the harp if they have handsome arms and neat elbows, and to wear Lincoln Green toxophilite hats and feathers, but that they may bring down some "desirable" young man with those killing bows and arrows of theirs?"
Etymology
From Toxophilus, the title of a 1545 book by Roger Ascham intended to mean ‘lover of the bow’, from Ancient Greek τόξον (tóxon, “bow”) + φίλος (phílos, “love”); equivalent to τόξον (tóxon) + -philite.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.