"airy fairy" meaning in English

See airy fairy in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Adjective

IPA: /ˈeəɹi feəɹi/ Audio: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Persent101-airy fairy.wav Forms: more airy fairy [comparative], most airy fairy [superlative]
Etymology: Coined by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in 1830 in his poem Lilian. Etymology templates: {{coin|en|Alfred, Lord Tennyson|in=1830}} Coined by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in 1830 Head templates: {{en-adj}} airy fairy (comparative more airy fairy, superlative most airy fairy)
  1. (informal, somewhat derogatory) Insubstantial. Tags: derogatory, informal
    Sense id: en-airy_fairy-en-adj-B6Qqa6FU Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, English reduplications, Pages with 1 entry, Pages with entries Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 50 50 Disambiguation of English reduplications: 50 50 Disambiguation of Pages with 1 entry: 50 50 Disambiguation of Pages with entries: 50 50
  2. (informal, somewhat derogatory) Impractical. Tags: derogatory, informal
    Sense id: en-airy_fairy-en-adj-IzC6oH3E Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, English reduplications, Pages with 1 entry, Pages with entries Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 50 50 Disambiguation of English reduplications: 50 50 Disambiguation of Pages with 1 entry: 50 50 Disambiguation of Pages with entries: 50 50

Alternative forms

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Download raw JSONL data for airy fairy meaning in English (1.9kB)


This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-03-18 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-03-02 using wiktextract (f2d86ce and 633533e). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.