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Thin in a way that looks elegant — slim, and moving well. The key is that svelte is a compliment, and a stylish one. 'Thin' can sound worried, 'skinny' can sound , but svelte says the body has a good line to it, like a dancer's. Because of that, you meet it most in fashion writing, in magazines, and when someone has lost weight and looks good: 'she came back from the summer looking svelte'. It is used of people far more than things, but writers do stretch it to objects with a long, clean shape — a svelte phone, a svelte sports car. That use is a bit on purpose. The word feels a little fancy and a little foreign in English; you would write it more readily than say it in ordinary talk. Say it SVELT, one syllable, and yes, English lets you start a word with sv- here because it came in from another language. Careful with people's bodies, though — even a compliment about weight can land badly.
苗條、修長好看；台灣講「身材很好」「線條很好看」「很纖細」。注意它是稱讚，不是中性的「瘦」——「瘦」對應的是 thin。
組成Borrowed from French svelte, which came from Italian svelto, meaning 'stretched out'. That was the past participle of a verb meaning 'to pull out, to pluck out', from a Latin verb vellere, 'to pluck, to stretch'. So the picture inside the word is of something drawn out long.
原始詞典資料2 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
svelteadj/ˈsvɛlt/
- 1
Attractively thin; gracefully slender.
- Psychoanalytic theory[…]seemed to promise to introduce a certain becoming amplitude into discussions of what different people are like — only to turn, in its streamlined trajectory across so many institutional boundaries, into the sveltest of metatheoretical disciplines, sleeked down to such elegant operational entities as the mother, the father, the preoedipal, the oedipal, the other or Other.
- Clearly the producers of “The Producers” were so little inclined to tinker with a winning formula that they chose not to excise a few lines of dialogue to accommodate the svelter physique of their new leading man, preposterous though it is that anyone in a fit of pique would deride a fellow as “once-husky.”
- 2
Refined, delicate.
- Peering down from the cockpit at grazing elephant, you have the feeling that what you are beholding is wonderful, but not authentic. It is not only incongruous in the sense that animals simply are not as big as trees, but also in the sense that the twentieth century, tidy and svelte with stainless steel as it is, would not possibly permit such prehistoric monsters to wander in its garden.
- At 61, Bryant looks good – smart and svelte in an electric blue suit, youthful, a full head of hair except for a white scar at the back that looks like a side door into his brain.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。