halflin

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   Scottish and northern English dialect: a half-grown or adolescent person, historically especially a boy employed on a farm

   The farmer hired a halflin to tend the cattle until harvest.

2. 2
   noun

   dated dialect and disparaging: a person regarded as half-witted or foolish

   The speaker contemptuously dismissed the young man as a halflin.

3. 3
   adj

   Scottish and northern English dialect: half-grown, youthful, or not fully mature

   A halflin farm worker received less pay than a fully grown man.

From Scots halflin, formed from half and the diminutive suffix -ling, with the final g absent in common dialect forms; compare halfling. The word is recorded for an adolescent or half-grown person and, disparagingly, a half-witted person. This lexeme is distinct from the Scots carpenter's-plane homograph hafflin or halflin.

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