Other forms: voles
A vole is a small rodent with a short tail. A field vole, water voles, a vole in the grass.
It is stouter than a mouse with smaller ears and a much shorter tail, and it feeds owls and kestrels across Europe — vole numbers rise and fall in cycles that drag predator numbers with them. The water vole is Ratty in The Wind in the Willows.
1nounvoleA small short-tailed rodent.
“An owl swooped down and caught a vole in the long grass.”
vole is an animal.
From a Norwegian dialect word meaning field, through the Orkney term vole mouse, meaning field mouse. The second half was later dropped.
Proto-Germanic
*walþuz — forest
Old Norse
vǫllr — field
nrn
vollj
English, today
vole
Borrowed from nrn vollj, from Old Norse vǫllr (“field”), from Proto-Germanic walþuz (“forest”). The Orkney dialectal term vole mouse, lit. “field mouse”, was introduced to general English by George Barry in 1805; John Fleming in 1828 was first to refer to the creature by the epithet vole alone. Displaced earlier names for these species which also classified them as mice, e.g. short-tailed field mouse.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA