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wolverine

nounattested in dialogue

  • United States//ˌwʊlvəˈɹiːn//
  • //ˈwʊlvəˌɹiːn//
  • //ˈwɒlvəˌɹiːn//

A solitary, fierce mammal of the Mustelidae family, Gulo gulo.

noun

  1. 1

    A solitary, fierce mammal of the Mustelidae family, Gulo gulo.

    “Wish I'd been more polite to that girl,” the sheriff remarked regretfully. “I ain't had a bite to eat since four o'clock this morning, and I'm hungry as a wolverine. … I know she'd have give me another drink of that old moonshine she has.”

Etymology

1619; alteration of earlier wolvering (1574), diminutive of wolver (“ravenous or savage animal; person who behaves like a wolf”) (1593), ultimately from wolf.

Forms

plural
wolverines
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).