elve
Obsolete form of elf.
Noun alt of, obsolete
- Obsolete form of elf.
- Sir Olof, he rode out at early day, / And so came he unto an Elve-dance gay.
- Is it the offspring of thoughtless animal spirits, or the elve of fancy continually flitting round the expected pleasure? - 1796, Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Oxford, published...
Origin
Obsolete form of elf.
Forms
Noun astronomy, climatology
- A rapidly expanding disk-shaped region of red luminosity in the ionosphere, lasting less than a thousandth of a second, which occurs high above energetic cloud-to-ground lightning of positive or negative polarity.
- It is likely that the first elve was recorded with the Space Shuttle low-light camera. - 2006, Martin Füllekrug, Eugene A. Mareev, Michael J. Rycroft, Sprites, elves and intense lightning discharges, page 37:
Origin
From e(mission of) l(ight and) v(ery low-frequency perturbations from) e(lectromagnetic pulse sources), and to avoid clashing with the acronym ELF (extremely low frequency) used in the same field of science.