elflock

From elf +‎ lock.

elflock (plural elflocks)

1. (now rare) A lock of hair that is tangled.
   • 1828, Mary Russell Mitford, “The Fisherman in his Married State” in Our Village, London: G.B. Whittaker, p. 278,

     Never was even washerwoman more untidy. A cap all rags, from which the hair came straggling in elf-locks over a face which generally looked red-hot […]

   • 1963, Margery Allingham, chapter 17, in The China Governess‎:

     The face which emerged was not reassuring. […]. He was not a mongol but there was a deficiency of a sort there, and it was not made more pretty by a latter-day hair cut which involved eccentrically long elf-locks and oiled black curls.

• Random House Dictionary, 2nd Edition. Unabridged, 1987.