Windfucker
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The common kestrel (Falco tinnunculus). archaic, vulgar
"Succhia capra, a kinde of bird which is ſaid to ſuck a goates vdder. Some haue taken it for the winde-fucker. [...] Succhiéllo, an augre, a percer, [...]. Alſo a bird called a winde-fucker."
- 2 A term of abuse. derogatory, vulgar
"Let Parliament Jone [nickname of a woman acting as an informant for the authorities to identify seditious or unlicensed printing presses] (the Devills windefucker) flie after me if she can; beware Lewis, I have need to mute."
Example
More examples"Succhia capra, a kinde of bird which is ſaid to ſuck a goates vdder. Some haue taken it for the winde-fucker. [...] Succhiéllo, an augre, a percer, [...]. Alſo a bird called a winde-fucker."
Etymology
If the term is a compound of wind + fucker, it may preserve an old sense of fuck (“to beat, strike”) which is also found in cognates (for example, Bohuslän Swedish fokka (“to fuck; thrust, push”)) but was otherwise lost from English, and it can be compared to the regional synonym fuckwind. (Wright's English Dialect Dictionary compares fuck in the latter word to fjúka (“be driven (by the wind); fly”) instead, while Liberman says the Norse word "has no [other?] cognates anywhere in Germanic".) However, the synonym windsucker is almost as old, and was rendered in older texts as windſucker using a long s, so some scholars think windfucker is a misreading of windſucker; others think windſucker is a bowdlerization of windfucker. Compare the later term windhover and the Orkney term windcuffer. Modern attestations of the second, vulgar sense may be unrelated to the bird.
Related phrases
More for "windfucker"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.