[6. WAVE sb. + -LET.] A little wave, a ripple.
1813. Shelley, Q. Mab, viii. 24. Like the vague sighings of a wind at even, That wakes the wavelets of the slumbering sea.
1856. Geo. Eliot, Scenes Cler. Life, Amos Barton, ii. The head, with its thin wavelets of brown hair, indents the little pillow.
1873. Black, Pr. Thule, v. 77. The white wavelets that were breaking on the beach.
b. transf. and fig.
c. 1810. Coleridge, in Lit. Rem. (1838), III. 360. You only hide it by foam and bubbles, by wavelets and steam-clouds, of ebullient rhetoric.
1874. H. R. Reynolds, John Baptist, i. 3. The transcendent Intelligence which presides over the law and measure of every wavelet of the universal energy.
1879. Macdonald, P. Faber, I. vi. 61. Slowly she rose through a sky freckled with wavelets of cloud.
