Wolverine

How to spell wolverine

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce wolverine

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does wolverine mean?

1. nounA stocky, powerful carnivorous mammal of the weasel family, found in cold northern forests.

Wolverine in a sentence

• The documentary tracked a single wolverine across the snowy tundra.

• A wolverine can drag prey several times its own weight.

Where does wolverine come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Wolverine is the name of a stocky, powerful member of the weasel family that roams the cold forests of the far north. The word appears in English around the early 1600s as an alteration of an earlier form, 'wolvering', whose exact formation is somewhat obscure. It is clearly built on 'wolf', the native Old English word for the predator, with an added ending; people seem to have named the animal after the wolf because of its fierce, almost wolf-like reputation for ferocity and appetite, even though biologically it is no relation. The closing '-ine' suffix is the same Latin-derived ending found in animal names like 'feline' and 'bovine', and it helped settle the modern spelling into a tidy '-rine' form. Because the middle of the word follows the plain English 'wolf' and the ending follows the regular '-ine' pattern, the spelling is fairly predictable once you connect it back to its source.

How the word is built

• wolv- (from wolf)
• -er- (agentive/connective)
• -ine (noun suffix)