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Origin and history of fairy

fairy(n.)

c. 1300, fairie, "land of the fay," from Old French faerie, from fee (see fay) + -erie (see -ery). By late 14c. in reference to a supernatural resident of fairie.

In ordinary use an elf differs from a fairy only in generally seeming young, and being more often mischievous. [Century Dictionary]

But that was before Tolkien. The sense shift from place to inhabitant is perhaps via intermediate forms such as fairie knight "supernatural or legendary knight" (c. 1300). In Spenser, faeries are heroic and human-sized. As a name for the diminutive winged beings in children's stories, from early 17c.

Yet I suspect that this flower-and-butterfly minuteness was also a product of "rationalization," which transformed the glamour of Elfland into mere finesse, and invisibility into a fragility that could hide in a cowslip or shrink behind a blade of grass. It seems to become fashionable soon after the great voyages had begun to make the world seem too narrow to hold both men and elves; when the magic land of Hy Breasail in the West had become the mere Brazils, the land of red-dye-wood. [J.R.R. Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories," 1947]

Hence, figurative adjective use in reference to lightness, fineness, delicacy. The slang meaning "effeminate male homosexual" is recorded by 1895.

Fairy ring, of certain fungi in grass fields (as we would explain it now), is from 1590s. Fairy godmother attested from 1820. Fossil Cretaceous sea urchins found on the English downlands were called fairy loaves, and a book from 1787 reports that "country people" in England called the stones of the old Roman roads fairy pavements.

also from c. 1300

Entries linking to fairy

fay(n.)

"fairy," late 14c., from Old French fae, feie (12c., Modern French fée) from Medieval Latin fada. OED derives it from Latin Fata, "the Fates" (see fate) ultimately from fatum, neuter past participle of fari "to speak." However Fata is a rare word in Latin (the Fates were usually referred to as the Parcae), and another possibility is that it is a derivative of Fatuus as an alternative name for the Roman oracular god Faunus (see fatuous), who resembled northern European mythic figures such as the woodwose, and whose name may have become a term for one who was psychic or insane (as suggested by de Vaan). Fatua is a term used by Arnobius Afer (4c.) to describe similar pagan entities. Compare also Odin.

[By the 1450s] The French word derived ultimately from the fays of chivalric romance had become thoroughly naturalized among the English and freighted with a set of royal associations not given before to the native 'elves' whom it had largely replaced. [Ronald Hutton, Queens of the Wild, 2022.]

Middle English also used fay as an adjective to mean "enchanted, magical" (late 14c.). The modern adjective meaning "homosexual" is attested by 1950s. For the "white person" sense see ofay.

eldritch(adj.)

"hideous, ghastly, weird," c. 1500, of uncertain origin; apparently somehow from elf (compare Scottish variant elphrish), an explanation OED finds "suitable;" Watkins connects its elements with Old English el- "else, otherwise" (from PIE root *al- "beyond") + rice "realm" (from PIE root *reg- "move in a straight line," with derivatives meaning "to direct in a straight line," thus "to lead, rule"). Dictionaries of the Scots Languages notes a theory that it is "Possibly repr[esenting] O.E. *ælf- or *elfrīce, 'fairy kingdom'" (compare fairy, originally the name of the habitation of the fay.)