filly

UK/ˈfɪli/US/ˈfɪli/

nounC1Common in everyday speech and writing · #7,732 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: fillies

A filly is a young female horse. A yearling filly, the filly won, a fast filly.

In racing the word has a precise cut-off: a female horse is a filly until she turns four and a mare after that, and a male is a colt then a horse. Some of the great races are for fillies only. It comes from the same Old Norse root as foal.

Definitions of filly

1nounfillyA young female horse.C1
“The mare gave birth to a healthy filly in the spring.”

filly is a horse.

Where it comes from

Old Norse fylja means a young female horse, related to foal. The word replaced no native English term.

Proto-Indo-European
*peh₂w-
Old Norse
fylja
English, today
filly

From Old Norse fylja (whence Danish føl), related to a doublet of foal. Cognate with Dutch veulen, German Fohlen.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

filly in the wild

A filly is a female horse that is too young to be called a mare.
Filly
In most cases, a filly is a female horse under four years old.
Filly
Nellie Morse was an American Thoroughbred racehorse best known as the fourth filly to win the Preakness Stakes.
Nellie Morse
In a racing career lasting from May 1956 until July 1957, the filly ran seven times and won three races for her owner Queen Elizabeth II.
Carrozza
In a racing career which lasted from April 1993 to November 1994 the filly ran twelve times and won four races.
Intrepidity

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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