Nymph

In Greek and Roman mythology a nymph is a spirit of nature or minor goddess having the bodily form of a beautiful young woman. Nymphs were believed to live in the countryside, close to streams and springs, and to be pursued as potential sexual partners by the satyrs.

The word nymph may also be used, though only in poetical contexts, of any attractive young woman, and, very differently, in entomology, to refer to the larva of certain insects such as the mayfly and the dragonfly.

The word nymph is almost a transliteration of the Ancient Greek νύμφη (numphe), and the range of uses of the English word broadly resembles that of its Greek ancestor.

The diminutive form, nymphet, may be used to refer to a sexually precocious young girl – like Lolita, the 12 year old girl who is the object of her step-father’s sexual obsession in Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita (later adapted as a film, first by Stanley Kubrick in 1962 and then by Adrian Lyne in 1997).