elflock

English edit

From elf +‎ lock.

elflock (plural elflocks)

(now rare) A lock of hair that is tangled.
- 1828, Mary Russell Mitford, “The Fisherman in his Married State”, in Our Village‎^[1], London: G.B. Whittaker, page 278:
  Never was even washerwoman more untidy. A cap all rags, from which the hair came straggling in elf-locks over a face which generally looked red-hot […]
- 1963, Margery Allingham, chapter 17, in The China Governess: A Mystery, London: Chatto & Windus, →OCLC:
  The face which emerged was not reassuring. […]. He was not a mongol but there was a deficiency of a sort there, and it was not made more pretty by a latter-day hair cut which involved eccentrically long elf-locks and oiled black curls.

lock of hair that is tangled