bloodsucker

Etymology

From blood + sucker. Sense 5 (“changeable lizard”) is perhaps because of the reddish color of its neck.

noun

  1. An animal that drinks the blood of others, especially by sucking blood through a puncture wound; a hemovore.
  2. (by extension) Any parasite.
  3. (by extension) One who attempts to take as much from others as possible; a leech.
  4. A vampire.
    Meyer, in turn, offered a chaste variation on the promiscuous bloodsuckers of Anne Rice. And back in Rice’s heyday of the 1980s and ’90s, mass market copies of her “Interview With the Vampire” occupied the same spinning racks as other critically slammed authors of the ’70s and ’80s: Danielle Steel, Sidney Sheldon, Judith Krantz, Jackie Collins. 2023-07-06, Pamela Paul, “What’s the Story With Colleen Hoover?”, in The New York Times
  5. The changeable lizard (Calotes versicolor).

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