Jump to content

wyvern

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

[edit]
English Wikipedia has an article on:
Wikipedia
A heraldic wyvern

Alternative forms

[edit]

Etymology

[edit]

Alteration of Middle English wyver (“viper”), from Old Northern French wivre, from Vulgar Latin *vivra, *vibra, from Latin vīpera (“viper; snake, serpent”). Doublet of weever and viper. Related to viviparous.

Pronunciation

[edit]

Noun

[edit]

wyvern (plural wyverns)

  1. (mythology, folklore, fantasy, heraldry) A draconian creature possessing wings, only two legs and usually a barbed tail.
    • 1814 July 7, [Walter Scott], “Castle-Building”, in Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since. […], 2nd edition, volume I, Edinburgh:  […] James Ballantyne and Co. for Archibald Constable and Co.; London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, →OCLC, page 46:
      [I]f (notwithstanding his obligations to the three ermines passant) he sometimes cursed in his heart the jargon of heraldry, its griffins, its moldwarps, its wyverns, and its dragons, with all the bitterness of Hotspur himself, there were moments when these communications interested his fancy and rewarded his attention.
    • 1940-54 The Collected Poetry of Malcolm Lowry, "WE SIT UNHACKLED DRUNK AND MAD TO EDIT", UBC Press,1992, p.222:
      Notions of freedom are tied up in drink / Our ideal life contains a tavern / Where man may sit and talk of or just think / All without fear of the nighted wyvern, / Or yet another tavern where it appears.
    • 1956 July, Col. H. C. B. Rogers, “Railway Heraldry”, in Railway Magazine, page 479:
      Above the shield was the well-known Midland crest of a legless wyvern (a wyvern normally has two legs).
    • 2023 [2005], Ronald L. Bonewitz, “Minerals: Oxides”, in Smithsonian Rock and Gem: The Definitive Guide to Rocks, Minerals, Gems and Fossils, Softcover 2023 American Edition, page 150:
      according to the 11th-century French bishop Marbodius, “ruby is the solitary and glowing eye which dragons and wyverns carry in the middle of their foreheads.”

Hyponyms

[edit]

Translations

[edit]

See also

[edit]
Retrieved from "https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=wyvern&oldid=93424136"