Word.ws English Dictionary

bloodsucking

/ˈblʌdˌsʌkɪŋ/

bloodsucking adjective: that draws off the blood of another animal, or a person.

Adjective

bloodsucking (not comparable)

  1. That draws off the blood of another animal, or a person.
    • Bedbugs win neither praise for their sophisticated technique, nor very much respect for the fact that they don’t carry diseases, as most bloodsucking human ectoparasites do.2010 August 7, May Berenbaum, “This Bedbug’s Life”, in The New York Times
  2. (broadly) parasitic, leechlike or freeloading

Noun

bloodsucking (countable and uncountable, plural bloodsuckings)

  1. Parasitic, leechlike behavior.
    • Economic blood-sucking of the Indian peoples, who are forced to pay immense sums of money to sustain rich Indian Civil Servants1940, Basil Mathews, “Worldwide reaction to events in India”, in The Asiatic Review, volume 36, page 255

Forms of bloodsucking

pluralbloodsuckings

Origin of bloodsucking

From blood + sucking.

Words formed from bloodsucking

Questions about bloodsucking

What does bloodsucking mean?
Bloodsucking means that draws off the blood of another animal, or a person.
What part of speech is bloodsucking?
Bloodsucking can be an adjective or a noun.
How do you pronounce bloodsucking?
Bloodsucking is pronounced /ˈblʌdˌsʌkɪŋ/ (US).

Words near bloodsucking in the dictionary

  1. bloodsuck
  2. bloodsucked
  3. bloodsucker
  4. bloodsuckers
  5. bloodsuckery
  6. bloodsucking
  7. bloodsucks
  8. bloodswap
  9. bloodswaps
  10. Bloodsworth
  11. Bloodsworths

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bloodsucking (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Wodencafe-bloodsucking.wav.

Cite this entry: “bloodsucking.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bloodsucking. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.