vixen

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See also: Vixen

English

Alternative forms

Etymology

Alteration of fixen (female fox), from Middle English fixen, from Old English fyxen (female fox), from Proto-Germanic *fuhsinjō (female fox). Voiced v- is from the Southern dialectal forms of Middle English. Compare German Füchsin (female fox). See also fox.

Pronunciation

Noun

vixen (plural vixens)

  1. A female fox.
  2. A malicious, quarrelsome or temperamental woman.
    • 1749, Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, volumes (please specify |volume=I to VI), London: A[ndrew] Millar, [], →OCLC:
      He was prudent and industrious, and so good a husbandman, that he might have led a very easy and comfortable life, had not an arrant vixen of a wife soured his domestic quiet.
    • 1859:, George Eliot. Adam Bede: page 54. Köln: Könemann Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, 1999:
      [] and if Solomon was as wise as he is reputed to be, I feel sure that when he compared a contentious woman to a continual dripping on a very rainy day, he had not a vixen in his eye–a fury with long nails, acrid and selfish.
  3. (colloquial) A racy or salacious woman.
  4. a wife who has sex with other men with her husband's consent

Synonyms

Hypernyms

  • (female fox): fox

Translations

Anagrams