Harpies, fabulous ravenous creatures, living in filth and defiling everything they touch, with the head and breast of a woman, the wings and claws of a bird, and a face pale with hunger, the personification of whirlwinds and storms, conceived of as merely ravening, wasting powers.
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Haroun-al-Raschid * Harrington, James