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wendigo.

Noun
Horror
MEANING

A malevolent being in certain Algonquian-speaking peoples’ traditions, frequently associated in English accounts with insatiable hunger or cannibalism.

Use it for

a culturally situated supernatural threat; hunger without satiety in a tradition-aware narrative; folklore rather than a generic invented monster

Words that belong together

  • wendigo stories
  • a wendigo account

On the page

The researcher compared the wendigo account with the storyteller’s own explanation.
She declined to turn the wendigo stories into one universal set of rules.

Related words

windigo (spelling variant)supernatural being
Word forms
Base
wendigo

Explore related collections

Horror vocabulary

Usage notes

Primary category: horror. Forms: Singular wendigo; plural wendigos. Legacy lexical fields mirror sense 1 only. Use numbered sense fields for all meanings.

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