Other forms: flits, flitting, flitted
To flit is to move lightly and quickly from place to place. Flit between rooms, flitting from job to job, a bird flits.
The lightness is the point — a flit is quick and leaves nothing behind, which is why it suits birds, insects and thoughts. Of people it carries a hint of not settling. In Scottish and northern use, to flit means simply to move house, which is the older sense and comes from the Old Norse for moving.
1verbflitTo move lightly and quickly from place to place.
“Butterflies flitted from flower to flower in the sunny garden.”
2verbhouseTo move house, in Scottish and northern use.
“They flitted to a new flat in Glasgow at the end of the month.”
flit is a light quick movement.
FLIT → little jumps, the way a FLEA goes
A flea is gone from the place you saw it before your hand gets there.
hooks ontoflea
Middle English flitten comes from Old Norse flytja, to move or carry. The sense of moving house is the older one.
Proto-Indo-European
*plewd- — to flow; run
Proto-Germanic
*flutjaną
Old Norse
flytja — to move
Middle English
flitten
English, today
flit
From Middle English flitten, flytten, from Old Norse flytja (“to move”), from Proto-Germanic flutjaną, from Proto-Indo-European plewd- (“to flow; run”). Cognate Icelandic flytja, Swedish flytta, Danish flytte, Norwegian flytte, Faroese flyta. Compare also stq flitskje (“to rush; run quickly”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire