Other forms: vixens
A vixen is a female fox, or a fierce quarrelsome woman. A vixen with cubs, the vixen screamed, called her a vixen.
The scream heard on winter nights is usually a vixen calling for a mate, and it sounds unnervingly human. As an insult the word is dated and reserved for women, with no male equivalent. It is one of the few English words keeping an old feminine ending.
1nounvixenA female fox.
“The vixen led her cubs out of the den at dusk.”
vixen is an animal, or an insult.
From Old English fyxen, a female fox. The initial v shows a southern English dialect pronunciation preserved in the word.
Proto-Germanic
*fuhsinī
Proto-West Germanic
*fuhsini
Old English
*fyxen
Middle English
fixen
English, today
vixen
Built from
Alteration of earlier fixen, from Middle English fixen, fixene, from Old English fyxen (compare also Old English fyxe (“female fox”)), from Proto-West Germanic fuhsini, from Proto-Germanic fuhsinī; the voiced v- comes from the Southern dialectal forms of -. Alternatively, from the Old English - adjective fyxen (“of the fox”), as in the phrase fixen hȳd (“fox skin”; compare Middle English foxen fox).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA