svelte

Etymology

From French svelte, from Italian svelto (“stretched out”), past participle of svellere (“to pluck out, root out”), from Vulgar Latin *exvellere, from ex + vellere (“to pluck, stretch”).

adj

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. 1990, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, published 2008, page 24
   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.” January 19, 2007, Charles Isherwood, “Welterweight Bialystock Treads Softly on Big Shtick”, in New York Times
   My first priority was to help Trumps lose her pudgy look and gain a healthier, svelter size. 2009, Kim Bloomer, Animals Taught Me That, page 73
   If her dream of being naked in front of Simon were to come true – and she knew, somehow, that it would – she needed to be the sveltest version of herself that had ever existed. Fries wouldn't help peel away those pounds. 2010, M. S. Simpson, Kabuki in a G-String, page 158
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. 1942, Beryl Markham, West with the Night
   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. 5 August 2023, Simon Hattenstone, “Labour MP Chris Bryant on cleaning up parliament, and why he’s not afraid to pick a fight: ‘I’ve got in more scrapes than most people’”, in The Guardian