Other forms: werewolves
A werewolf is a person who turns into a wolf, traditionally at the full moon. A werewolf legend, hunted by a werewolf, turn into a werewolf.
The folklore is European and old, and modern film has added most of the details people now assume — the full moon, the silver bullet, the bite that passes it on. The plural is werewolves. Lycanthrope is the learned word for the same idea, from Greek. Note that werewolves belong to a wider family of shapeshifter legends found across the world, and that the wolf is simply the local predator.
1nounwerewolfA person who becomes a wolf at the full moon.
“The werewolf in the story is a farmer for most of the month.”
werewolf is a creature of legend.
Old English werewulf is wer, a man, plus wulf — literally man-wolf. That wer survives in exactly one other English word, werewolf's distant relative in Latin, vir, and in the archaic term wergild, the price paid for killing a man.
Proto-West Germanic
*werawulf
Old English
werewulf
Middle English
werwolf
English, today
werewolf
From Middle English werwolf, from Old English werewulf, from Proto-West Germanic werawulf, from Proto-West Germanic - wer + wulf. Cognate with Dutch weerwolf, Low German Warwulf, German Werwolf, Danish varulv, Swedish varulv, and even possibly Finnish vironsusi. by surface analysis, were- + wolf.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA