Word of the Day:
wendigo
What It Means
A malevolent and violent cannibal spirit found in Anishinaabe, Ojibwe, and Cree mythology, which is said to inhabit the body of a living person and possess him or her to commit murder.
Synonym of splake (“kind of hybrid fish”).
Wendigo in Context
“The Windigo is a flesh-eating, wintry demon with a man buried deep inside of it. In some Chippewa stories, a young girl vanquishes this monster by forcing boiling lard down its throat, thereby releasing the human at the core of ice.”
Did You Know?
Borrowed from Ojibwe wiindigoo, from Proto-Algonquian *wi·nteko·wa (“owl; malevolent spirit, cannibalistic monster”). Compare Plains Cree wîhtikow, ᐃᐧᐦᑎᑯᐤ (“greedy person; cannibal; giant man-eating monster”).
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: wendigo (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “wendigo.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/wendigo. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.