weevil

English

WOTD – 18 June 2017
A boll weevil (Anthonomus grandis), a weevil (sense 2) that feeds on cotton buds and flowers

Etymology

From Middle English wevel, from Old English wifel (“beetle”), from Proto-West Germanic *wibil, from Proto-Germanic *wibilaz, from Proto-Indo-European *webʰel-, from *(h₁)webʰ- (“to wave, to weave”), said to be from the woven appearance of a weevil’s larval case,[1] + *-el-, *-l̥- (diminutive or attributive suffix); see also wave and weave.

Compare Old Saxon *wivil (“beetle”); Middle Low German wevel; Old High German wibil, wipil (modern German Wiebel (“beetle; chafer”)); Lithuanian vãbalas (“beetle; weevil”); Old Norse vifill, as in tordyfill (“dung beetle, scarab”) (whence Dutch tortwevel; Icelandic tordýfill, Norwegian tordivel, Old English tordwifel, Swedish tordyvel); dialectal Russian ве́блица (véblica, “intestinal worm”).

Pronunciation

  • (Received Pronunciation) IPA(key): /ˈwiːv(ə)l/
  • (General American) IPA(key): /ˈwiːvɪl/
  • Audio (Australia):(file)
  • Rhymes: -iːvəl
  • Hyphenation: wee‧vil

Noun

weevil (plural weevils)

  2. Any of many tens of thousands of species of herbivorous beetles, ranging in size from tiny to large, in the superfamily Curculionoidea, the most characteristic species having the head projecting in a distinctive snout with the mouthparts at the tip.
    Hypernyms: beetle < insect, bug (insect sense) < arthropod < bug (broad sense) < invertebrate < animal < creature, critter
    Hyponyms: true weevil; snout beetle (usually hyponymous)
    1. Any of many tens of thousands of species of herbivorous beetles of various sizes, in the family Curculionidae within the superfamily Curculionoidea.
      Synonym: true weevil
      Near-synonym: snout beetle (usually synonymous)
  3. Any of many similar, but more distantly related, beetles such as the biscuit weevil (Stegobium paniceum).
  4. (figurative, derogatory) A loathsome person.
    • 1950, Jack Lindsay, Fires in Smithfield. A Novel of Mary Tudor’s Reign, London: The Bodley Head, →OCLC, page 201:
      But you accuse other men of villainy with too easy a tongue, you weevil. I have never wanted you in this matter, and I have said so.
    • 2010 August 30, Charlie Brooker, “Buzzwords for blowhards”, in Alan Rusbridger, editor, The Guardian‎[1], London: Guardian News & Media, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 30 May 2023:
      Have you tried doing it yourself? It's not easy. I was hoping to illustrate this article with some self-created buzzwords for leftwingers to use. The first one I came up with was "molehill mountaineer", a pejorative term to describe the sort of perpetually furious rightwing weevil who spends their life calculatedly conflating issues such as the "Ground Zero mosque" into gigantic media crapgasms.

Derived terms

Translations

The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.
Translations to be checked

References

  1. ^ “weevil, n.”, in OED Online Paid subscription required⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926.
This page is issued from Wiktionary. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.