wolverine
Pluralwolverines, Wolverines
- 1A solitary, fierce mammal of the weasel family (Mustelidae), known to science as Gulo gulo.
Biologists fitted a young wolverine with a radio collar to follow it through the mountains.
He fought like a cornered wolverine when the guards tried to hold him down.
Note
The weasel-family animal carries a wolf in its name. Wolver, "a ravenous or savage animal," ultimately from wolf, gave the diminutive wolvering (1574), and the spelling wolverine appears by 1619. The name was about appetite and ferocity, not kinship. The idea survives in similes: a sheriff in Peter B. Kyne's The Understanding Heart says he is "hungry as a wolverine."
- 2A person connected with the University of Michigan, such as a student, a graduate, a member of one of its sports teams, or a fan.
As a proud Wolverine, she hangs a maize-and-blue flag outside her house every football season.
The Wolverines rallied in the second half to beat their old rivals.
- 3A person who was born in or lives in the US state of Michigan.
A Wolverine by birth, she still calls Michigan home after twenty years in Texas.
Like many Wolverines, he leaves Detroit for a cabin up north as soon as summer arrives.
SimilarMichigander
Note
Michigan's people answer to one of the American state nicknames, and it takes a capital: Wolverine. Eliza Wood Farnham's Life in Prairie Land (1846) lines it up beside the Buckeye of Ohio, the Sucker of Illinois and the Corn-cracker of Kentucky. Since the same capitalized word also names University of Michigan people, a sentence usually needs context to show that the whole state is meant.
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