Sylphlike describes a person — almost always a woman, and in practice almost always a dancer, a model, or someone being admired at a distance — who is thin in a light, moving, graceful way. The word does two jobs at once, and both matter. It says 'thin', and it says 'thin in a way that looks beautiful rather than worrying'. If you call someone sylphlike you are paying a compliment about how they move, not just how much they weigh. That is where the word comes from: a sylph, in old European stories, was a spirit that lived in the air — not quite a person, very light, floating. So sylphlike carries a faint sense of not-quite-solid, of someone who seems to weigh nothing when she walks or dances. It is a written, literary word. You will meet it in a novel, a ballet review, a fashion magazine, an obituary of an actress. Almost no one says it out loud in ordinary talk; a friend who said 'you're so sylphlike today' would be joking, or being deliberately fancy. It is also mostly used about women, and this is worth knowing rather than arguing with: a sylphlike man is possible in a sentence, but it will sound odd, and readers will feel the oddness. Though actually — the word has aged, and not all in one direction. Some writers now use it with a small twist, because praising a woman for being very thin is not as comfortable as it once was. So you will also meet sylphlike inside a sentence that is quietly criticising the fashion world, or describing what a character has starved herself to become. The word itself stays admiring; the sentence around it may not be. And people stretch it a little to things that are not people at all — a sylphlike vase, a sylphlike bridge — when they want to say the shape is slim and somehow weightless.

身材纖細輕盈的（多用來形容女子）；如精靈般苗條。注意：中文說「苗條」偏中性、日常，sylphlike 比它更文學、更帶讚美，而且多了「輕得像會飄」的感覺，接近「輕盈」「飄逸」那一層。不是「瘦弱」——瘦弱是 skinny、frail，帶擔心的意思，sylphlike 沒有。