Word.ws English Dictionary

boll weevils

boll weevils is the plural of boll weevil.

Meaning of boll weevil

Noun

boll weevil (plural boll weevils)

  1. A beetle (Anthonomus grandis) measuring an average length of six millimeters (¼ inch), which feeds on cotton buds and flowers, native to Central America.
    • “[…]What do you reckon the boll-weevils’ll eat if you dont^([sic]) get those cultivators in shape to raise them a crop?” I says, “sage grass?”1929, William Faulkner, “The Sound and the Fury”, in The Sound and the Fury & As I Lay Dying, New York, N.Y.: The Modern Library, published 1946, →OCLC, page 248
  2. (US, dated, informal) A conservative Southern Democrat.
    • As the veteran columnist John Chamberlain put it back in 1982, the ATARI Democrats ‘include many of the Southern “boll weevil” contingent that has supported Reagan on taxes, [and]^([sic]) is for using government to channel investment money to the newer “high tech” industries.2019, Richard Carr, quoting John Chamberlain, March of the Moderates […] , Bloomsbury Publishing, →ISBN

Questions about boll weevils

What is boll weevils the plural of?
Boll weevils is the plural of boll weevil.

Words near boll weevils in the dictionary

  1. Bolkhov
  2. Bolkhovsky
  3. bolking
  4. boll
  5. boll weevil
  6. boll weevils
  7. Bolla
  8. bollan bane
  9. Bolland
  10. Bollandism
  11. Bollandist

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: boll weevils (page history and authors); boll weevil (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.

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