weevil – English noun declension

English noun forms of weevil

Noun: weevil
Singularweevil
Pluralweevils

Sample Sentences

  • 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. [1950, Jack Lindsay, Fires in Smithfield. A Novel of Mary Tudor’s Reign, London: The Bodley Head, →OCLC, page 201:]
  • 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. [2010 August 30, Charlie Brooker, “Buzzwords for blowhards”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 30 May 2023:]

Etymology

1. 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, + *-el-, *-l̥- (diminutive or attributive suffix); see also wave and weave.
2. 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”). See: Middle English Nouns 'wevel', Old English Nouns 'wifel', Old Norse Nouns 'vifill', Icelandic Nouns 'tordýfill', Old English Nouns 'tordwifel', Swedish Nouns 'tordyvel'.

Verbs referencing "weevil"

Latvian Nouns vabole.