Coined in its current sense byJ. R. R. Tolkien in the 1930s, featured in the novelsThe Hobbit andThe Lord of the Rings. Jocularly etymologized by him as from a hypothetical Old English*holbytla(literally“hole-builder”), fromhol(“hole”) +bytlan(“to build”) +-a(“-er”). Tolkien was possibly influenced by similar terms for house-sprites (probably fromHob, a hypocoristic form ofRobert), or an isolated mention ofhobbits (withhobgoblins following immediately afterwards) in a list of sprites and bogies from the 19th-centuryDenham Tracts.
2007 September 20, Christopher Joyce, “Case Grows for ‘Hobbit’ as Human Ancestor”,All Things Considered, National Public Radio:
Although partial remains of otherHobbits have surfaced at the same site, they say it could have been an isolated colony of inbred people who shared the same genetic abnormalities.
2011,Chris Stringer,The Origin of Our Species, Penguin, published2012, page215:
And in the island regions of southeast Asia, where the descendants oferectus, and theHobbit, and any similar relict populations lived, climate changes would have greatly disrupted connections between regions and populations, as sea levels rose and fell by 100 metres or more.
2016 June 9, James Griffiths, “This is how the ‘Hobbits’ of Indonesia became so small”, inCNN[1]:
The discovery of theHobbit skeleton in Liang Bua cave in 2003 was an instant sensation. But what it said about human evolution was less clear. Discoverer Mike Morwood proposed that it was a shrunken Homo erectus, the same species that eventually evolved to become us; others suggested theHobbits were descended from smaller, more primitive early humans such as Homo habilis or Australopithecus.
2018,Tim Flannery,Europe: The First 100 Million Years, Penguin, published2019, page270:
Thehobbit became extinct 50,000 years ago, about the time the first humans arrived on Flores, but the Pacific rat lived on.
According toRoyal Spanish Academy (RAE) prescriptions, unadapted foreign words should be written in italics in a text printed in roman type, and vice versa, and in quotation marks in a manuscript text or when italics are not available. In practice, this RAE prescription is not always followed.
hobbit on the Spanish Wikipedia.Wikipediaes