wargus
/ˈwɔː(ɹ)ɡəs/
wargus noun: an outlaw, outcast, or exile; one driven out of society for their crimes.
Noun
wargus (plural wargi)
- An outlaw, outcast, or exile; one driven out of society for their crimes.
- If anyone has dug up or despoiled a body already in the sepulchre, let him be an outlaw (wargus) — that is, let him be expelled from that district until it is agreeable to the relatives of the dead and those relatives themselves have sought on his behalf that he be allowed to live within the...1991, Katherine Fischer Drew, The Laws of the Salian Franks - Page 188
- Rather, civilization is made when the wolf becomes sovereign. Hobbes's sovereign wolf resembles instead Giorgio Agamben's sovereign, the correlative figure to the homo sacer characterized as the banned Germanic outlaw, the wargus, or wolf-man: […]2012, Nancy J. Hirschmann, Joanne H. Wright, Feminist Interpretations of Thomas Hobbes, page 87
Examples of wargus in a sentence
- In ancient Germanic law, the wargus was a figure 'excluded from the community' whom 'anyone was permitted to kill'.2013, Gideon Baker, Hospitality and World Politics - Page 131:
- In ancient Germanic law, the term wargus was used to refer to both the outlaw and the wolf-man.][2013, Peter Nyers, Rethinking Refugees: Beyond State of Emergency - Page 74
Forms of wargus
| plural | wargi |
|---|
Origin of wargus
From Anglo-Latin wargus, from wearg, wearh (“outlaw, criminal”), from Proto-West Germanic *warg, from Proto-Germanic *wargaz (“criminal, wolfish individual”), from Proto-Indo-European *wer- (“to twist, bend, crook”).
Questions about wargus
- What does wargus mean?
- Wargus means an outlaw, outcast, or exile; one driven out of society for their crimes.
- How do you use wargus in a sentence?
- In ancient Germanic law, the wargus was a figure 'excluded from the community' whom 'anyone was permitted to kill'.
- What part of speech is wargus?
- Wargus is a noun.
- How do you pronounce wargus?
- Wargus is pronounced /ˈwɔː(ɹ)ɡəs/.
- What is the plural of wargus?
- The plural of wargus is wargi.
Words near wargus in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: wargus (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: “wargus.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/wargus. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.