Other forms: fairies
A fairy is a small magical being of folklore, usually with wings in modern pictures and usually without them in the older stories. Fairy tale, the tooth fairy, at the bottom of the garden.
The winged, flower-sized fairy is largely a Victorian invention; earlier fairies were human-sized, dangerous and best not spoken about directly, which is why folklore is full of polite names for them — the good folk, the gentry. The word appears in a long list of compounds: fairy tale, fairy lights, fairy cake, fairy godmother. Note that fairy has also been used as a slur against gay men, which is worth knowing so as not to meet it unprepared.
1nounfairyA small magical being from folklore.
“The children left a tooth out for the fairy.”
2adjectivebelongingBelonging to fairies, or delicate and magical.
“Fairy lights along the whole hedge.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
fairy is a magical being.
Old French faerie meant enchantment or a land of enchantment, not a creature — from Latin fata, the Fates. English took the word for the place and then, by a misunderstanding, for its inhabitants. Fairyland is therefore slightly redundant.
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰeh₂-
Latin
fāta — goddess of fate
Old French
faerie
Middle English
faierie
English, today
fairy
From Middle English faierie, fairie, from Old French faerie, from fae (from Latin fāta (“goddess of fate”)) + -erie. Equivalent to fay + -ry. Attested in English from about 1330, in King Alisaunder, first in the sense of "enchantment, illusion, dream" ("that thou herdest is fairye") and shortly thereafter "realm of the fays, fairy-land" and "the inhabitants of fairyland, collectively". The re-interpretation of the term as a countable noun denoting individual inhabitants of fairy-land can be traced to the 1390s, but became common only in the 16th century, perhaps due to reinterpreting phrases like faerie knight.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA