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''flit'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260125204041-00-⌔

flit - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

flit (plural flits)

  • A fluttering or darting movement.
  • A sudden departure from a property.
    • ✤ I did a flit, as the landlord was due to arrive to collect the rent.
    • ✤ let’s do a moonlight flit, if the loanshark catches us here tomorrow without the money to pay our debts, he’ll break our fingers.
  • (physics) A particular, unexpected, short lived change of state.
    • ✤ My computer just had a flit.
  • (dated, slang) A homosexual.
    • ✤ The other end of the bar was full of flits. They weren’t too flitty-looking—I mean they didn’t have their hair too long or anything—but you could tell they were flits anyway.1

Verb

flit (third-person singular simple present flits, present participle flitting, simple past and past participle flitted)

  • To move about rapidly and nimbly.
    • ✤ A shadow flits before me,/Not thou, but like to thee; […]2
    • ✤ There were many apes with faces similar to his own, and further over in the book he found, under “M,” some little monkeys such as he saw daily flitting through the trees of his primeval forest. But nowhere was pictured any of his own people; in all the book was none that resembled Kerchak, or Tublat, or Kala.3
  • To move quickly from one location to another.
    • ✤ By their means it became a received opinion, that the souls of men departing this life, do flit out of one body into some other.4
    • ✤ The chevalier’s manner was now completely altered; and Francesca wondered within herself that he could be so amusing, as he exerted himself to describe the various visitors who flitted to and fro.5
  • (physics) To unpredictably change state for short periods of time.
    • ✤ My blender flits because the power cord is damaged.
  • (UK, dialect) To move house (sometimes a sudden move to avoid debts).
    • ✤ After this manner did the late Warden of Barchester Hospital accomplish his flitting, and change his residence.6
    • ✤ […] we can’t give any one house-room just now, for every Christmas Eve such a pack of Trolls come down upon us that we are forced to flit, and haven’t so much as a house over our own heads, to say nothing of lending one to any one else.7
  • To move a tethered animal to a new grazing location.
  • To be unstable; to be easily or often moved.
    • ✤ the free soul to flitting air resign’d8

Adjective

flit (comparative more flit, superlative most flit)

  • (poetic, obsolete) Fast, nimble.
    • ✤ And in his hand two darts exceeding flit,/And deadly sharpe he held […].9
    • ✤ To that god-trodden western shore, as flit benighted birds.10

Noun

flit (plural flits)

  • (networking) A flow control unit or flow control digit.
    • ✤ *header flit *

Etymology 1

From Middle English flitten, flytten, from Old Norse flytja (“to move”), from Proto-Germanic ﹡flutjaną, from Proto-Indo-European ﹡plewd- (“to flow; run”).

Cognate Icelandic flytja, Swedish flytta, Danish flytte, Norwegian flytte, Faroese flyta. Compare also Saterland Frisian flitskje (“to rush; run quickly”).

Pronunciation

  • IPA: /flɪt/
  • Audio (Australian): 🔊
  • Rhymes: -ɪt

Etymology 2

Short for fl (ow control un) it or fl (ow control dig) it.

Printed 2026-06-28.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

  1. 1951 July 16, J[erome] D[avid] Salinger, chapter 18, in The Catcher in the Rye, Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, →OCLC: ↩

  2. 1855, Tennyson, Maud: ↩

  3. 1912 October, Edgar Rice Burroughs, “Tarzan of the Apes”, in The All-Story, New York, N.Y.: Frank A. Munsey Co., →OCLC; republished as “Chapter 6”, in Tarzan of the Apes, New York, N.Y.: A[lbert] L[evi] Burt Company, June 1914, →OCLC: ↩

  4. 1597, Richard Hooker, chapter 5, in Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie ‎: ↩

  5. 1834, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], Francesca Carrara. […], volume I, London: Richard Bentley, […], (successor to Henry Colburn), →OCLC, pages 116–117: ↩

  6. 1855, Anthony Trollope, The Warden, →ISBN, page 199: ↩

  7. 1859, “The Cat on the Dovrefell”, in George Dasent, transl., Popular Tales from the Norse: ↩

  8. 1697, Virgil, “The Tenth Book of the Æneis”, in John Dryden, transl., The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Æneis. […], London: […] Jacob Tonson, […], →OCLC: ↩

  9. 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book II, Canto IV”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC: ↩

  10. 1928, W[illiam] B[utler] Yeats, Sophocles’ King Oedipus: A Version of the Modern Stage, London: Macmillan and Co., […], →OCLC: ↩

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