Dictionary

elflock en · NOUN

Etymology

From elf + lock.

Meanings

1. (archaic) A lock of hair that is tangled.
   • The face which emerged was not reassuring.[…]. He was not a mongol but there was a deficiency of a sort there, and it was not made more pretty by a latter-day hair cut which involved eccentrically long elf-locks and oiled black curls. 1963, Margery Allingham, chapter 17, in The China Governess: A Mystery, London: Chatto & Windus, →OCLC:
   • All went unshaven, and many had long, filthy elf-locks hanging about their faces, and ragged beards reaching to their girdles. 1904, Stanley J. Weyman, “XII. The Peasants' Camp”, in The Abbess of Vlaye:
   • [T]heir wide Farthingales extreamly fill the Coach, an one would take their thick and knotty Elflocks for Hempen ſtuffing, broke out of an old pack-ſaddle. 1699, [Antoine de Brunel], A Journey Into Spain, London: R. Wellington, page 68:
   • Never was even washerwoman more untidy. A cap all rags, from which the hair came straggling in elf-locks over a face which generally looked red-hot […] 1828, Mary Russell Mitford, “The Fisherman in his Married State”, in Our Village, London: G.B. Whittaker, page 278:

Forms

Translations (5)

uk ко́втун (lock of hair that is tangled) · pl kołtun (lock of hair that is tangled) · cmn 糾結的頭髮 /纠结的头发 (lock of hair that is tangled) · de Weichselzopf (lock of hair that is tangled) · fi takku (lock of hair that is tangled)