elflock

plural elflocks

1. archaicA lock of hair that is tangled.

   All went unshaven, and many had long, filthy elf-locks hanging about their faces, and ragged beards reaching to their girdles.

   1904, Stanley J. Weyman, “XII. The Peasants' Camp”, in The Abbess of Vlaye

   3 more examples

   [T]heir wide Farthingales extreamly fill the Coach, an one would take their thick and knotty Elflocks for Hempen ſtuffing, broke out of an old pack-ſaddle.

   1699, [Antoine de Brunel], A Journey Into Spain, London: R. Wellington, page 68

   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 […]

   1828, Mary Russell Mitford, “The Fisherman in his Married State”, in Our Village, London: G.B. Whittaker, page 278

   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.

   1963, Margery Allingham, chapter 17, in The China Governess: A Mystery, London: Chatto & Windus, →OCLC