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Monday, March 07, 2005

fey

from Dictionary.com/Word of the Day

fey \FAY\, adjective:
1. Possessing or displaying a strange and otherworldly aspect or quality; magical or fairylike; elfin.
2. Having power to see into the future; visionary; clairvoyant.
3. Appearing slightly crazy, as if under a spell; touched.
4. (Scots.) Fated to die; doomed.
5. (Scots.) Marked by a sense of approaching death.

Fey comes from Middle English feye, feie, from Old English fæge, "fated to die."

Word History: The history of the words fey and fay illustrates a rather fey coincidence. Our word fay, “fairy, elf,” the descendant of Middle English faie, “a person or place possessed of magical properties,” and first recorded around 1390, goes back to Old French fae, “fairy,” the same word that has given us fairy. Fae in turn comes from Vulgar Latin Fta, “the goddess of fate,” from Latin ftum, “fate.” If fay goes back to fate, so does fey in a manner of speaking, for its Old English ancestor fge meant “fated to die.” The sense we are more familiar with, “magical or fairylike in quality,” seems to have arisen partly because of the resemblance in sound between fay and fey.

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