Other forms: beavers
A beaver is a river animal with strong teeth that builds dams from trees. A beaver dam, beavers at work, busy as a beaver.
Its teeth are orange with iron and never stop growing, and the gnawing keeps them in check. The dams create wetland that supports enormous numbers of other species, which is why beavers have been reintroduced across Europe. Note that the word is Germanic and very old.
1nounbeaverA river animal that builds dams from trees.
“Beavers had chewed through the trunks of the young trees by the river.”
beaver is an animal.
Old English befer comes from a Proto-Indo-European word for the animal, probably related to a root meaning brown.
Middle English
bever
English, today
beaver
From Middle English bever. From Middle English bever, from Old English befer, from Proto-West Germanic bebru, from Proto-Germanic bebruz, from Proto-Indo-European bʰébʰrus (“beaver”). Cognate with West Frisian bever, Dutch bever, French bièvre, German Biber, dialectal Swedish bjur. Non-Germanic cognates include Welsh befer, Latin fiber, Lithuanian bẽbras, Russian бобр, ae 𐬠𐬀𐬎𐬎𐬭𐬀, and Sanskrit बभ्रु (“mongoose; ichneumon”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA