Citations:hobbit

• 2008, Tom Holt, Falling Sideways, Orbit books, →ISBN, p. 3:

  It was his thirty-third birthday and already he had a little round tummy like a hobbit

• 2007 September 20, Christopher Joyce, “Case Grows for ‘Hobbit’ as Human Ancestor”, All Things Considered, National Public Radio:

  Although partial remains of other Hobbits have surfaced at the same site, they say it could have been an isolated colony of inbred people who shared the same genetic abnormalities.

• 2011, Chris Stringer, The Origin of Our Species, Penguin 2012, p. 215:

  And in the island regions of southeast Asia, where the descendants of erectus, and the Hobbit, and any similar relict populations lived, climate changes would have greatly disrupted connections between regions and populations, as sea levels rose and fell by 100 metres or more.

(Unusual pre-Tolkien usage)

• , volume II, London: The Folklore Society, pages 77–80:

  Grose observes, too, that those born on Christmas Day cannot see spirits ; which is another incontrovertible fact. What a happiness this must have been seventy or eighty years ago and upwards, to those chosen few who had the good luck to be born on the eve of this festival of all festivals ; when the whole earth was so overrun with ghosts, boggles (1), bloody-bones, spirits, demons, ignis fatui,...boggleboes, bogies, redmen, portunes, grants, hobbits, hobgoblins, brown-men (24), cowies, dunnies (25), wirrikows (26), allholdes, mannikins,...cutties (31), and nisses, and apparitions of every shape, make, form, fashion, kind and description, that there was not a village in England that had not its own peculiar ghost. Nay, every lone tenement, castles or mansion-house, which could boast of any antiquity had its bogle, its spectre, or its knocker.]