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What (who) is sylph - definition

MYTHOLOGICAL SPIRIT OF THE AIR

Sylphs; Sylphid; Sylphids; Female air spirit

sylph

n.

Fairy, fay, peri, sylphid.

Sylph

·noun Fig.: A slender, graceful woman.

II. Sylph ·noun An imaginary being inhabiting the air; a fairy.

III. Sylph ·noun Any one of several species of very brilliant South American humming birds, having a very long and deeply-forked tail; as, the blue-tailed sylph (Cynanthus cyanurus).

sylph

[s?lf]

¦ noun

1. an imaginary spirit of the air.

2. a slender woman or girl.

3. a mainly dark green and blue hummingbird with a long forked tail. [Genera Aglaiocercus and Neolesbia.]

Derivatives

sylphlike adjective

Origin

C17: from mod. L. sylphes, sylphi and the Ger. plural Sylphen, perh. based on L. sylvestris 'of the woods' + nympha 'nymph'.

Wikipedia

Sylph

A sylph (also called sylphid) is an air spirit stemming from the 16th-century works of Paracelsus, who describes sylphs as (invisible) beings of the air, his elementals of air. A significant number of subsequent literary and occult works have been inspired by Paracelsus's concept: Robert Alfred Vaughan noted that "the wild but poetical fantasies" of Paracelsus had probably exercised a larger influence over his age and the subsequent one than is generally supposed, particularly on the Rosicrucians, but that through the 18th century they had become reduced to "machinery for the playwright" and "opera figurantes with wings of gauze and spangles".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylph

Examples of use of sylph

1. Not the one where sylph–like ministers for obesity dole out calorie counts.

2. The world was run by fat, jolly, confident people in those days – Queen Victoria was hardly sylph–like either – but it was happy and at peace.

3. For Botticelli, Venus was an ethereally lyrical, slippery–hipped sylph, for Rubens she was a rubicund sensualist revelling in a luscious spillage of fat.

4. If it was not enough that the overweight are apparently less employable than their more sylph–like contemporaries, and clearly more mockable (who knew that fat suits would become such a comedy staple?), now comes even more cataclysmic news.

5. THE NEW NEIGHBOURS DUDLEY AND TING TONG Dudley is excitedly looking forward to the arrival of the sylph–like Ting Tong Macadangdang, chosen from a Thai Brides For You brochure.