# werewolf

Pronunciation: say "WAIR-wuulf" US /ˈwɛəɹwʊlf/, UK /ˈwɛːwʊlf/

## Noun

1. In 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.
   - Simple: In stories, a person who turns into a wolf or a wolf-like creature, often 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._

## 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.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/werewolf (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).