Other forms: weevils
A weevil is a small beetle with a long snout that ruins stored grain. Weevils in the flour, a grain weevil, check for weevils.
There are more species of weevil than of almost any other kind of animal, tens of thousands of them, and the long snout is used to drill into a seed to lay an egg inside. The boll weevil devastated American cotton in the early twentieth century.
1nounweevilA small beetle with a long snout that ruins stored grain.
“The flour was full of weevils, so we had to throw it away.”
weevil is an insect.
Old English wifel meant a beetle, from a Germanic root meaning to move about.
Proto-Indo-European
*webʰel-
Proto-Germanic
*wibilaz
Proto-West Germanic
*wibil
Old English
wifel — beetle
Middle English
wevel
English, today
weevil
Built from
From Middle English wevel, from Old English wifel (“beetle”), from Proto-West Germanic wibil, from Proto-Germanic wibilaz, from Proto-Indo-European webʰel-, from webʰ- (“to wave, to weave”), said to be from the woven appearance of a weevil’s larval case, + -el-; see also wave and weave. Compare Old Saxon wivil (“beetle”); Middle Low German wevel; Old High German wibil, wipil (modern German Wiebel (“beetle; chafer”)); Lithuanian vãbalas (“beetle; weevil”); Old Norse vifill, as in tordyfill (“dung beetle, scarab”) (whence Dutch tortwevel; Icelandic tordýfill, Norwegian tordivel, Old English tordwifel, Swedish tordyvel); dialectal Russian ве́блица (“intestinal worm”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA