bloodsucker

See also: blood-sucker

English

Etymology

From blood +‎ sucker. Sense 5 (“changeable lizard”) is perhaps because of the reddish color of its neck.

Noun

bloodsucker (plural bloodsuckers)

  1. An animal that drinks the blood of others, especially by sucking blood through a puncture wound; a hemovore.
  2. (by extension) Any parasite.
  3. (by extension) One who attempts to take as much from others as possible; a leech.
    Synonym: gadfly
  4. A vampire.
    • 2023 July 6, Pamela Paul, “What’s the Story With Colleen Hoover?”, in The New York Times‎:
      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. The changeable lizard (Calotes versicolor).

Alternative forms

Translations
parasite — see parasite
vampire — see vampire

Further reading
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