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pixie

UK/ˈpɪksi/US/ˈpɪksi/
nounB2Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,022 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: pixies

A pixie is a small mischievous fairy of folklore. Pixie tricks.

It belongs to the south-west of England, where being pixie-led meant being lost on the moor. A pixie cut is a very short hairstyle and is the word's commonest modern use.

John D. Batten · Public domain

Definitions of pixie

  1. 1nounpixieA small mischievous fairy of folklore.B2

    “Everything lost in that house was blamed on a pixie.”

pixie is a creature.

Where it comes from

The word appears in the seventeenth century in the folklore of south-west England and is of uncertain origin.

  1. Swedish

    pysk — fairy

  2. English, today

    pixie

Built from

  • Puck · English — Robin Goodfellow

unknown; 17thC, originally in the folklore of southwest England; perhaps diminutive of dialectal Swedish pysk (“fairy”), though the transmission of a Swedish dialect term to southwest Britain is unexplained; perhaps Puck (“Robin Goodfellow”) + -sy; see Wikipedia.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

pixie in the wild

  • A pixie (also called pisky, pixy, pixi, pizkie, piskie, or pigsie in parts of Cornwall and Devon) is a mythical creature of British folklore.

    Pixie

  • In traditional regional lore, pixies are generally benign, mischievous, short of stature, and childlike; they are fond of dancing and wrestling outdoors, which they perform through the night.

    Pixie

  • A pixie cut is a short hairstyle, generally short on the back and sides of the head and slightly longer on the top, with very short bangs.

    Pixie cut

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.