flit
A fluttering or darting movement.
Adjective
- Fast, nimble.
- And in his hand two darts exceeding flit, / And deadly sharpe he held [...]. - 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book II, Canto IV”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC:
- To that god-trodden western shore, as flit benighted birds. - 1928, W[illiam] B[utler] Yeats, Sophocles’ King Oedipus: A Version of the Modern Stage, London: Macmillan and Co., […], →OCLC:
Origin
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 Saterland Frisian flitskje (“to rush; run quickly”).
Forms
Derived
Noun Entry 2
- A fluttering or darting movement.
- A sudden departure from a property.
- I did a flit, as the landlord was due to arrive to collect the rent.
- let's do a moonlight flit, if the loanshark catches us here tomorrow without the money to pay our debts, he'll break our fingers.
- A particular, unexpected, short lived change of state.
- My computer just had a flit.
- A homosexual.
- The other end of the bar was full of flits. They weren't too flitty-looking—I mean they didn't have their hair too long or anything—but you could tell they were flits anyway. - 1951 July 16, J[erome] D[avid] Salinger,...
Forms
Derived
Noun computing, engineering
- A flow control unit or flow control digit.
- header flit
Origin
Short for fl(ow control un)it or fl(ow control dig)it.
Forms
Verb
- To move about rapidly and nimbly.
- A shadow flits before me, / Not thou, but like to thee; […] - 1855, Tennyson, Maud
- There were many apes with faces similar to his own, and further over in the book he found, under "M," some little monkeys such as he saw daily flitting through the trees of his primeval forest. But nowhere was pictured...
- To move quickly from one location to another.
- By their means it became a received opinion, that the souls of men departing this life, do flit out of one body into some other. - 1597, Richard Hooker, chapter 5, in Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie:
- The chevalier's manner was now completely altered; and Francesca wondered within herself that he could be so amusing, as he exerted himself to describe the various visitors who flitted to and fro. - 1834, L[etitia]...
- To unpredictably change state for short periods of time.
- My blender flits because the power cord is damaged.
- To move house (sometimes a sudden move to avoid debts).
- After this manner did the late Warden of Barchester Hospital accomplish his flitting, and change his residence. - 1855, Anthony Trollope, The Warden, →ISBN, page 199:
- […] we can't give any one house-room just now, for every Christmas Eve such a pack of Trolls come down upon us that we are forced to flit, and haven't so much as a house over our own heads, to say nothing of lending one...
- To move a tethered animal to a new grazing location.
- To be unstable; to be easily or often moved.
- the free soul to flitting air resign'd - 1697, Virgil, “The Tenth Book of the Æneis”, in John Dryden, transl., The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Æneis. […], London: […] Jacob Tonson, […],...