cougar
Pluralcougars
- 1A large, long-tailed wild cat of the species Puma concolor, native to North and South America.
Wildlife officials fitted the cougar with a GPS collar to track its movements through the foothills.
Ranchers in the valley have lost several calves to cougars this spring.
Similarpuma, panther, catamount
Note
One animal with an unusually long list of English names: puma, mountain lion, panther, catamount and painter all mean this same cat. The Anglo-American Magazine of 1854 already singles it out as the only native long-tailed cat north of the 30th parallel, overlooking the jaguar, which once ranged that far north too; the so-called wild cats there are short-tailed lynxes.
- 2An older woman who actively seeks casual, often sexual, relationships with younger men, regarded as preying on them.
Everyone at the reunion whispered that she'd turned into a cougar after the divorce.
The lounge has a reputation as a hangout for cougars and the twenty-something men they are hunting.
UsageOften meant as a joke, but it judges a woman by age; neutral writing describes the relationship instead.
Note
Slang from the US and Canada that casts an older woman who pursues younger men as the big cat on the hunt. Speakers have even built a mock taxonomy around it: in Donna McDonald's Dating a Cougar, a woman less than eight years older is a puma instead.
Checked 2 Nov 2026 · 1 fact
- Donna McDonald wrote Dating a Cougar, in which the character Regina distinguishes a puma from a cougar by an age difference of less than eight years. en.wiktionary.org
Practice
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Origin
Brazilian Portuguese suçuarana may come from Old Tupi sûasuarana ("deerlike animal"), built on suasú ("deer"), or perhaps from Guaraní. A related Brazilian name, recorded as cuguacu ara, was shortened in French to couguar, the source of the English word.