Pronunciations
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/feɪ/
Adjective
About to die; doomed; on the verge of sudden or violent death.
Usage- Archaic
- dialectal
- Poetic
- Examples
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Surely the Gods have made him fey, having ordained his destruction and our humbling before these Demons.
More examples (1)
Then Fëanor laughed as one fey, and he cried: “None and none! What I have left behind I count now no loss; needless baggage on the road it has proved. Let those that cursed my name, curse me still, and whine their way back to the cages of the Valar! Let the ships burn!”
Dying; dead.
Usage- Obsolete
Possessing second sight, clairvoyance, or clairaudience.
Usage- Ireland
- Scotland
- Synonyms
Overrefined, affected.
- Examples
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More examples (2)
His interlocutor was whimsical if not downright fey. He pushed his spectacles to the top of his nose. He shoved them into his greying locks like an effeminate racing driver. He gave Pym sherry and put a hand on his backside in order to propel him to a long window that gave on to a row of council houses.
Hoffman does not rely on his talent to carry him through a role. He spent five and a half months transmuting himself into Capote. … He lost 40 pounds and practiced the inscrutable voice and fey mannerisms for an hour or two every day.
He'd stand at the board making jokes the kids didn't understand, improvising fey little couplets of dactylic verse.
More examples (4)
… he did not tell Mary Alonso, who had taken Dell's place as a source of gossip and information, and with whom he went out for drinks on occasion, usually along with Mary's partner, Roberta, a fey, freckly, dark-haired girl, …
Guadalupe was a fey mexicana with long braids and a taste for embroidered Oaxacan blouses and overwrought indigenous jewelry, and also a former university student like Araceli.
Bespoke designer Kirk Miller, who offers a contemporary version at his Soho atelier, says, "A club collar shows that a man pays attention to detail. It's a simple way to communicate elegance." And please don't call it a Peter Pan, the club's fey sister.
Most Ivy League graduates are unaccustomed to pepper spray; perhaps he should spray himself in the face once or twice, to test his tolerance. He should also resist the urge to bring high-end camping equipment to protests—this will make him look fey and elitist.
Strange or otherworldly.
- Examples
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Gratefully she crooned with them, so inimitably that old Christine Inglis, on her way to early Mass, vowed the girl was fey.
More examples (2)
Neither are good looks any criterion; and vulgarity, or at least what a given community terms so, does not necessarily impair certain mysterious characteristics, the fey grace, the elusive, shifty, soul-shattering, insidious charm that separates the nymphet from such coevals of hers as are incomparably more dependent on the spatial world of synchronous phenomena than on that intangible island of entranced time where Lolita plays with her likes.
Local opinion held Mr. Underwood to be an intense, profane little man, whose father in a fey fit of humor christened Braxton Bragg, a name Mr. Underwood had done his best to live down.
Spellbound.
- Synonyms
Adjective
Magical or fairylike.
Noun
A fairy.
Usage- Countable
- Uncountable
Fairy folk collectively.
Usage- Countable
- Uncountable
- construed as plural
Verb
To cleanse.
Usage- UK usage
- dialectal
- Obsolete
- Transitive
- Examples
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to fey a drain or ditch
Adjective
slightly insane
- Synonyms
suggestive of an elf in strangeness and otherworldliness
- Synonyms
- Examples
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thunderbolts quivered with elfin flares of heat lightning