Word.ws English Dictionary

wooly bear

wooly bear is the alternative spelling 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

Forms of wooly bear

pluralwooly bears

Questions about wooly bear

What is wooly bear the alternative spelling of?
Wooly bear is the alternative spelling of woolly bear.

Words near wooly bear in the dictionary

  1. woolworks
  2. Woolworth gun
  3. Woolworth guns
  4. Woolworth's
  5. wooly
  6. wooly bear
  7. wooly bears
  8. wooly mammoth
  9. wooly mammoths
  10. wooly pate
  11. wooly pated

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wooly bear (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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Cite this entry: “wooly bear.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/wooly_bear. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.