vampire bat

English

Noun

vampire bat (plural vampire bats)

  1. Any of the three small bats of the subfamily Desmodontinae, native to Central and South America, which use their teeth to cut the skin of larger animals while they are asleep and surreptitiously drink blood, their sole source of food.
    • 1930, Sax Rohmer, The Day the World Ended, published 1969, page xix. 172:
      I noticed a peculiarity which distinguished these bats from any others with which I had come in contact (and on the Rio Negro my experiences in this respect had been ghastly and terrible: men wither and die there from nightly visitations of vampire bats).
A vampire bat.

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