fairy [ME] Although we now think of fairies as small, delicate creatures they come from a powerful source—Latin fata ‘the Fates’ (see fate). The old spelling faerie is first recorded in The Faerie Queene, the title of a poem by Edmund Spenser celebrating Queen Elizabeth I (the figure of the ‘Faerie Queene’ herself was taken to stand for Elizabeth). Faierie was originally the collective form of the word, with fae or nowadays fay as the singular.