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bloodsucker

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
See also: blood-sucker

English

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Etymology

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From blood +‎ sucker. The “changeable lizard” sense is perhaps because of the reddish color of its neck.

Pronunciation

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Noun

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bloodsucker (plural bloodsuckers)

  1. An animal that drinks the blood of others, especially by sucking blood through a puncture wound; a leech, mosquito etc. [from 14th c.]
    • 1975, Larry Woiwode, Beyond the Bedroom Wall, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, page 145:
      I once saw a boy who waded beyond the gravel walk out of the water with bloodsuckers fringing his ankles like leaves.
  2. Someone who sheds blood; a bloodthirsty person; a violent criminal. [from 16th c.]
  3. (figurative, derogatory) Someone who preys on others, or who attempts to take as much from others as possible; an extortioner; a leech. [from 16th c.]
    Synonym: gadfly
  4. A supernatural being who feeds on (especially human) blood; a vampire. [from 18th c.]
    • 2023 July 6, Pamela Paul, “What’s the Story With Colleen Hoover?”, in The New York Times‎[1]:
      Meyer, in turn, offered a chaste variation on the promiscuous bloodsuckers of Anne Rice. And back in Rice’s heyday of the 1980s and ’90s, mass market copies of her “Interview With the Vampire” occupied the same spinning racks as other critically slammed authors of the ’70s and ’80s: Danielle Steel, Sidney Sheldon, Judith Krantz, Jackie Collins.
  5. Any of various lizards of the family Agamidae, especially the changeable lizard (Calotes versicolor) of Asia, and the jacky dragon of Australia, Amphibolurus muricatus). [from 18th c.]

Alternative forms

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Derived terms

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Translations

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Further reading

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