Other forms: hobbits
A hobbit is a small imaginary being with furry feet, from Tolkien. A hobbit hole, hobbits and men, the hobbits of the Shire.
Tolkien said the word came to him unbidden while marking exam papers, and he wrote the first sentence about one on a blank page. Palaeontologists nicknamed a small extinct human species the hobbit after finding it in Indonesia in 2003.
1nounhobbitA small imaginary being with furry feet, from Tolkien.
“In Tolkien's story, a hobbit leaves his comfortable home to go on a great adventure.”
hobbit is a being.
Coined by J. R. R. Tolkien in the 1930s, said to have come to him while marking exam papers.
+ (word) Coined in its current sense by J. R. R. Tolkien in the 1930s, featured in the novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Jocularly etymologized by him as from a hypothetical holbytla literally “hole-builder”, from hol. Tolkien was possibly influenced by similar terms for house-sprites (probably from Hob, a hypocoristic form of Robert), or an isolated mention of hobbits (with hobgoblin following immediately afterwards) in a list of sprites and bogies from the 19th-century Denham Tracts.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA