cloudlet

cloud +‎ -let

cloudlet (plural cloudlets)

1. A little cloud.
   • 1872, Thomas Durfee, "El Paseo" in The Village Picnic and Other Poems, Providence, RI: George H. Whitney, p. 112,

     I gaze at the beautiful dames that go / In their open volantes up and down; / Bewitchingly floating, by threes and by twos, / In their gauzy cloudlets of silk and of lace, / That seem to have robbed the sky of its hues, / And seem to have robbed the swan of his grace.

   • 1911, D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock, London:Heinemann, p. 365,

     We drove briskly up the long, sleeping hill, and bowled down the hollow past the farms where the hens were walking with the red gold cocks in the orchard, and the ducks like white cloudlets under the aspen trees revelled in the pond.

   • 1916, James Joyce, chapter 3, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man‎:

     The slide was shot back. A penitent emerged from the farther side of the box. The near slide was drawn. A penitent entered where the other penitent had come out. A soft whispering noise floated in vaporous cloudlets out of the box. It was the woman: soft whispering cloudlets, soft whispering vapour, whispering and vanishing.

   • 1938, George Orwell, chapter 6, in Homage to Catalonia‎:

     The shell-bursts from the Fascist anti-aircraft guns dotted the sky like cloudlets in a bad water-colour, but I never saw them get within a thousand yards of an aeroplane.

   • 1963, Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, in Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories, translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter, New York: Vintage, p. 49,

     At the world's edge began a strewing of roses, a shining and a blooming ineffably pure; baby cloudlets hung illumined, like attendant amoretti, in the blue and blushful haze […]

   • 1968, Ivo Andrić, "Mustapha Magyar" in The Pasha's Concubine and Other Tales, translated by Joseph Hitrec, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 93,

     The water overflowed, creating a wide circle of soggy ground and marsh and shallow puddles above which, in the brilliance of the morning, there was a shimmer of butterflies and dense cloudlets of flies pulsing like veils.