Meanings
- Pertaining to archery.
1 more example
What causes them to labour at pianoforte sonatas, and to learn four songs from a fashionable master at a guinea a lesson, and to play the harp if they have handsome arms and neat elbows, and to wear Lincoln Green toxophilite hats and feathers, but that they may bring down some "desirable" young man with those killing bows and arrows of theirs?
1847 January – 1848 July, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 3, in Vanity Fair […], London: Bradbury and Evans […], published 1848, →OCLC
plural toxophilites
- Someone keen on or an expert at archery; a lover or practitioner of archery.
Here the gardens of the place encroached with a somewhat wide sweep upon the paddock, and gave ample room for the doings of the toxophilites. Miss Thorne got together such daughters of Diana as could bend a bow, and marshalled them to the targets.
1857, Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers, Volume the Second, →ISBN, page 100
Synonyms & antonyms
Origin
- Ancient Greekτόξον“bow”
- Englishtoxophilite
From Toxophilus, the title of a 1545 book by Roger Ascham intended to mean ‘lover of the bow’, from Ancient Greek τόξον (tóxon, “bow”) + φίλος (phílos, “love”); equivalent to τόξον (tóxon) + -philite.
More words from Ancient Greek
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
toxophilite. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/toxophilite
“toxophilite.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/toxophilite. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “toxophilite,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/toxophilite.
Source: toxophilite on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.