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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

hobbit.

A member of a fictional race of small humanoids with shaggy hair and hairy feet.

6 characters2 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/ˈhɒbɪt/[-ɪʔ]

  1. A member of a fictional race of small humanoids with shaggy hair and hairy feet.

  2. A member of a fictional race of small humanoids with shaggy hair and hairy feet. A person of short stature.

    humorous

  3. An extinct species of hominin, Homo floresiensis, with a short body and relatively small brain, fossils of which have been recovered from the Indonesian island of Flores.

  4. A socially unappealing, overly academic student.

    US · slang · uncommon
Where this word comes from

Coined in its current sense by J. R. R. Tolkien in the 1930s, featured in the novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Jocularly etymologized by him as from a hypothetical Old English *holbytla (literally “hole-builder”), from hol (“hole”) + bytlan (“to build”) + -a (“-er”). Tolkien was possibly influenced by similar terms for house-sprites (probably from Hob, a hypocoristic form of Robert), or an isolated mention of hobbits (with hobgoblins following immediately afterwards) in a list of sprites and bogies from the 19th-century Denham Tracts.

noun

  1. A Welsh unit of weight, equal to four Welsh pecks, or 168 pounds.

  2. An old unit of volume (2+¹⁄₂ bushels, the volume of 168 pounds of wheat).

    archaic
Where this word comes from

Probably from hoppet, hobbet (“basket”).

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.