bloodsucker

Noun

bloodsucker (plural bloodsuckers)

1. An animal or insect that drinks the blood of others, especially by sucking blood through a puncture wound; a leech, mosquito etc.
   • I once saw a boy who waded beyond the gravel walk out of the water with bloodsuckers fringing his ankles like leaves.1975, Larry Woiwode, Beyond the Bedroom Wall, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, page 145
   • You're a bloodsucker, so you eat blood. Just blood.2023, translated in 2025, Berta Páramo and translated by Marc Correa Haro, Lice: How to Survive on Humans, page 79
2. Someone who sheds blood; a bloodthirsty person; a violent criminal.
3. (derogatory, figuratively) Someone who preys on others, or who attempts to take as much from others as possible; an extortioner; a leech.

   Synonyms:

   gadfly

4. A supernatural being who feeds on (especially human) blood; a vampire.
   • 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...2023 July 6, Pamela Paul, “What’s the Story With Colleen Hoover?”, in The New York Times
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).