werewolf
Pluralwerewolves
- 1In myth and horror fiction, a person who is turned into, or can turn into, a wolf or a wolflike human, often said to change at the full moon.
Villagers bolted their doors on the night of the full moon, convinced a werewolf was prowling the forest.
The novel's hero is a teenage werewolf who struggles to hide his transformations from his classmates.
Similarlycanthrope, wolfman
Note
The name is literally "man-wolf": Old English werewulf joined wer, "man," to wulf, "wolf," and Dutch weerwolf, German Werwolf and Swedish varulv are its cousins. The plural follows wolf, so werewolves, never werewolfs. Lycanthrope is the learned equivalent, while man-wolf and wolfman are plainer English names for the same creature of myth and horror.
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Origin
From Middle English werwolf, from Old English werewulf, from Proto-West Germanic *werawulf, from *wer (“man”) + *wulf (“wolf”); by surface analysis, were- + wolf. It is cognate with Dutch weerwolf, German Werwolf, Danish and Swedish varulv, and possibly Finnish vironsusi, while French garou (as in loup-garou) and Medieval Latin gerulphus also come from Germanic, probably Frankish *werawulf.