elfin

1. 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
2. 2

   A little urchin or child.

3. 3

   Any of the butterflies in the subgenus Incisalia of the North American lycaenid genus Callophrys.

1. 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 occurre
   • If Burd Ellen had gone “widishins" round the church, she would, I think, have used the best homoeopathic specific against the Elf-King's power; for "to go widishins" was the chief element in elfin practices, and if mortals wished to resist
2. 2

   Resembling an elf or elves, especially in tiny size or features.

   • Nhung Ngo had nearly the shortest legs at Site-43. She was one of the shortest members of staff, though seven inches above beneath the positively elfin Delfina Ibanez, and yet Lillian found her inexplicably difficult to shake.
   • I first met Demis Hassabis, the remarkable human, in the mid-2010s: an elfin figure with dark hair falling forward toward angular eyebrows, his face framed by standard-issue spectacles.

syn. list in elven