From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishnymphnymph /nɪmf/ noun [countable] 1 RFRMone of the spirits of nature who, according to ancient Greek and Roman stories, appeared as young girls living in trees, mountains, streams etc2 literaryALWOMAN a beautiful girl or young woman
Examples from the Corpus
nymph• Melanie would be a nymph crowned with daisies once again; he saw her as once she had seen herself.• The same was true for mealworm larvae, a species of butterfly, mosquito larvae, and milkweed-bug nymphs.• I was by then realizing something that had eluded me before, about the fleeing nymphs.• At the moment Paris was living with a lovely nymph named Oenone.• Roguish fauns and naked nymphs peeked down at Billy from festooned cornices.• The blue-winged olive nymph lives among weeds such as water crowfoot.• Hood ornaments of streamlined nymphs bearing tiny globes stood as bookends to his Architectural Digests.• The nymphs, or first larval stages of mayflies, are also adapted to very particular conditions.Origin nymph (1300-1400) Old French nimphe, from Latin, from Greek nymphe “bride, nymph” 