Word.ws English Dictionary

woolly bears

woolly bears is the plural of woolly bear.

Meaning of woolly bear

Noun

woolly bear (plural woolly bears)

  1. (colloquial) A hairy caterpillar.
    • Caryæ is not a woolly bear, but is quite as densely covered with hairs and crawls quite as fast as any woolly bear.1902, Ida Mitchell Eliot, Caaroline Gray Soule, Caterpillars and Their Moths, page 204
    1. (colloquial) A larva of the species Pyrrharctia isabellaa of arctiid moths.
  2. (historical, slang) An explosive shell that gives out dense smoke when it bursts.
    • As Bourne came out, he could see shells exploding by the dump, with some shrapnel bursting, woolly-bears they called them, overhead.1929, Frederic Manning, The Middle Parts of Fortune, Vintage, published 2014, page 236

Questions about woolly bears

What is woolly bears the plural of?
Woolly bears is the plural of woolly bear.

Words near woolly bears in the dictionary

  1. woolly back
  2. woolly backs
  3. woolly bear
  4. woolly bear caterpillar
  5. woolly bear caterpillars
  6. woolly bears
  7. woolly bluecurls
  8. woolly fringe moss
  9. woolly hat
  10. woolly hats
  11. woolly hippopotamus

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: woolly bears (page history and authors); woolly bear (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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