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possum

nounverbattested in dialogue

  • //ˈpɒsəm//

A marsupial of several families of the order Diprotodontia, found in Australia and neighboring islands.

noun

  1. 1

    A marsupial of several families of the order Diprotodontia, found in Australia and neighboring islands.

  2. 2

    An opossum, a marsupial of the family Didelphidae of the Americas.

Etymology

Derived from opossum by apheresis.

verb

  1. 1

    To play possum; to feign sleep, illness, or death.

Forms

plural
possums
past tense
possumed
past participle
possumed
present participle
possuming
third person singular
possums
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).