noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
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"But you accuse other men of villainy with too easy a tongue, you weevil. I have never wanted you in this matter, and I have said so."
"It was Mendel's good fortune that the arrival of the pea weevil postdated the completion of the pea part of his research."
Any of many tens of thousands of species of herbivorous beetles, ranging in size from tiny to large, in the superfamily Curculionoidea, the most characteristic species having the head projecting in a distinctive snout with the mouthparts at the tip.
Common synonyms include: beetle, crab, curculionid beetle, flea, garden weevil, grain pest.
It was Mendel's good fortune that the arrival of the pea weevil postdated the completion of the pea part of his research.
Pronounced /ˈwiːv(ə)l/.
From Middle English wevel, from Old English wifel (“beetle”), from Proto-West Germanic *wibil, from Proto-Germanic *wibilaz, from Proto-Indo-European *webʰel-, from *(h₁)webʰ- (“to wave, to weave”), said to be from the woven appearance of a weevil’s larval case, + *-el-, *-l̥- (diminutive or attributive suffix); 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 (véblica, “intestinal worm”).