different between dwarfish vs dwarves

English

Etymology

dwarf +? -ish

Adjective

dwarfish (comparative more dwarfish, superlative most dwarfish)

1. Like a dwarf; being especially small or stunted.
   • c. 1605, William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, Scene 2, [1]

     […] now does he feel his title / Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe / Upon a dwarfish thief.

   • 1757, Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Section XXIV, in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, London: John C. Nimmo, 1887, Volume I, p. 242, [2]

     Besides the extraordinary great in every species, the opposite to this, the dwarfish and diminutive, ought to be considered. Littleness, merely as such, has nothing contrary to the idea of beauty.

   • 1843, Edgar Allan Poe, "The Gold-Bug" [3]

     The vegetation, as might be supposed, is scant, or at least dwarfish.
2. Of, pertaining to, or made by or for dwarves.

   Dwarfish axes are some of the finest weapons available.

Translations

English

Noun

dwarves

1. plural of dwarf
   • 1842, George Webbe Dasent (trans.), The Prose Or Younger Edda Commonly Ascribed to Snorri Sturluson, page 8

     Then said Þriði: They took also his skull and made thereof heaven and set it up over the earth with four sides, and under each corner they set dwarves: they hight thus Austri, Vestri, Norþri, Suþri.

   • 1854, Barclay Pennock (trans.), Rudolph Keyser, The Religion of the Northmen, page 299

     The belief in Dwarves as inhabitants of the interior of the earth and especially of large isolated rocks, was likewise a direct offshoot of the Asa-Mythology.

   • 2001, Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, Well of Darkness, HarperCollinsPublishers, page 139

     When the human magi arrived, Dunner was the dwarf responsible for arbitrating between them and the dwarves as to location and the hundreds of other minor quibbles that seemed likely to turn into major battles, owing to simple misunderstandings of each other's ways.

Anagrams

• swarved