werewolf. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.

The American Heritage^® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.

werewolf

SYLLABICATION:	were·wolf
PRONUNCIATION:	wârwlf, wîr-, wûr-
VARIANT FORMS:	also wer·wolf
NOUN:	A person transformed into a wolf or capable of assuming the form of a wolf.
ETYMOLOGY:	Middle English, from Old English werewulf : wer, man; see w-ro- in Appendix I + wulf, wolf; see wolf.
WORD HISTORY:	The wolf in werewolf is current English; the were is not. Werewulf, “werewolf,” occurs only once in Old English, about the year 1000, in the laws of King Canute: “lest the madly ravenous werewolf too savagely tear or devour too much from a godly flock.” The wer– or were– in wer(e)wulf means “man”; it is related to Latin vir with the same meaning, the source of virile and virility. Both the Germanic and the Latin words derive from Indo-European wro–, “man.” Wer–* also appears, though much disguised, in the word world. World is first recorded (written wiaralde) in Old English in a charter dated 832; the form worold occurs in Beowulf. The Old English forms come from Germanic wer-ald–, “were-eld” or “man-age.” The transfer of meaning from the age of humans to the place where they live has a parallel in the Latin word saeculum,* “age, generation, lifetime,” later “world.”


The American Heritage^® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.