Noun: harpy
| Singular | harpy |
| Plural | harpies |
Sample Sentences
-
Both table and provisions vanish'd quite,
-
With sound of harpies' wings and talons heard. [1671, John Milton, “The Second Book”, in Paradise Regain’d. A Poem. In IV Books. To which is Added, Samson Agonistes, London: […] J[ohn] M[acock] for John Starkey […], →OCLC:]
-
But her most subtle wiles proved ineffectual in ridding her, even for a moment, of her harpy jailer[…] [1927, Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Outlaw of Torn, HTML edition, The Gutenberg Project, published 2008:]
-
[…] Ed Miliband has yet to come up with a definition of “the squeezed middle” that excludes anyone, but you can bet your bottom dollar he has these laptop-wielding harpies in mind. [2011 March 17, Toby Young, “Mumsnet isn't representative of the 'squeezed middle'. It's just a bunch of Guardian-reading, laptop-wielding harpies”, in The Telegraph, archived from the original on 20 Mar 2011:]
-
c. 1772, Oliver Goldsmith, letter to Mrs. Bunbury
-
The harpies about me all pocket the pool.
Nouns inflected like harpy
clitoridectomy,
royal jelly,
whoopsy,
surrogacy,
urinary,
rastrography,
renoscopy,
sourtop blueberry,
forcible entry,
superficiary,
lipidosity,
potability,
phonography,
hyperproperty,
greenery,
conjugality,
ring singularity,
Brittany,
ignobility,
obscurity, etc. (List truncated at 20 nouns)
Etymology
Ultimately from Middle French harpie, from Latin harpyia, from Ancient Greek ἅρπυιᾰ (hárpuiă, literally “snatcher”), from ἁρπάζω (harpázō, “to snatch, seize”). Compare rapacious. Middle English had arpie. See: Latin Nouns '
harpyia'.