/dwɔɹf/, /dwɔːf/
OriginFrom Middle English dwergh, dwerw, dwerf, from Old English dweorg, from Proto-West Germanic *dwerg, from Proto-Germanic *dwergaz.
Cognate with Scots droich, dwerch (“dwarf, midget”); Old High German twerc (German, Luxembourgish Zwerg (“dwarf”)); Old Norse dvergr (Danish dværg (“dwarf, midget”), Faroese dvørgur (“dwarf”), Icelandic dvergur (“dwarf”), Norwegian Bokmål dverg (“dwarf”), Norwegian Nynorsk dverg, verg (“dwarf”), Swedish dvärg (“dwarf”)); Old Frisian dwirg (Saterland Frisian Dwärch (“dwarf”), West Frisian dwerch (“dwarf”)); Middle Low German dwerch, dwarch, twerg (German Low German Dwarg (“dwarf”)); Middle Dutch dwerch, dworch (Dutch dwerg (“dwarf”)).
The Modern English noun has undergone complex phonetic changes. The form dwarf is the regular continuation of Old English dweorg, but the plural dweorgas would have given rise to dwarrows and the oblique stem dweorge- would have led to dwery. These forms are sometimes found as the nominative singular in Middle English texts and in English dialects. A parallel case is that of Old English burg giving burgh, borough, burrow, bury.
- Any member of a race of beings from (especially Scandinavian and other Germanic) folklore, usually depicted as having some sort of supernatural powers and being skilled in crafting and metalworking, often as short with long beards, and sometimes as clashing with elves.
“[T]he elf king and his queen made a royal progress every noon with a splendid retinue of dwarves and sprites, […]”
“Nidavellir, which is sometimes called Svartalfheim, where the dwarfs (who are also known as dark elves) live beneath the mountains and build their remarkable creations.”
- An animal, plant or other thing much smaller than the usual of its sort.
“dwarf tree”
“dwarf honeysuckle”
- A dwarf star.
“But none of those brown dwarfs were speeding along on a trajectory that would carry them out of the galaxy like “runaway” hypervelocity stars observed by astronomers in the last two decades.”
- especiallyMiniature.
“The specimen is a very dwarf form of the plant.”
“It is possible to grow the plants as dwarf as one desires.”
- transitiveTo render (much) smaller, turn into a dwarf (version).
- transitiveTo make appear (much) smaller, puny, tiny; to be much larger than.
“The newly-built skyscraper dwarfs all older buildings in the downtown skyline.”
“The train bursts from Rusher Cutting Tunnel with explosive violence, the engine's exhaust soaring high into the air, but dwarfed by the mighty limestone cliffs on either side.”
“In the past two years, NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope has located nearly 3,000 exoplanet candidates ranging from sub-Earth-sized minions to gas giants that dwarf our own Jupiter.”
- transitiveTo make appear insignificant.
“Bach dwarfs all other composers.”
- intransitiveTo become (much) smaller.
- To hinder from growing to the natural size; to make or keep small; to stunt.
“At present the whole sex is in a manner dwarfed and shrunk - into a race of beauties that seems almost another species”
“Even the most common moral ideas and affections […] would be stunted and dwarfed, if cut off from a spiritual background.”
- A standardized debugging file format.
“In debug mode, a compiled binary will include debugging symbols in the DWARF debugging format.”
Formsdwarfs(plural) · dwarves(plural) · dwarfer(comparative) · dwarfest(superlative) · dwarfs(present, singular, third-person) · dwarfing(participle, present) · dwarfed(participle, past) · dwarfed(past)