Etymology

weevil

wee·vil
W4E1E1V4I1L1

Today it means: Any of many tens of thousands of species of herbivorous beetles, ranging in size from tiny to large, in the superfamily Curculionoidea, the most characteristic species having the head projecting in a distinctive snout with the mouthparts at the tip. Full definition →

Middle English wevel ← Old English wifel ← Proto-West Germanic *wibil
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The story

  1. Proto-Indo-European · derived from*webʰel-
  2. Proto-Germanic · inherited from*wibilaz
  3. Proto-West Germanic · inherited from*wibil
  4. Old English · inherited fromwifel“beetle”
  5. Middle English · inherited fromwevel
  6. English todayweevil

From Middle English wevel, from Old English wifel (“beetle”), from Proto-West Germanic *wibil, from Proto-Germanic *wibilaz, from Proto-Indo-European *webʰel-, from *(h₁)webʰ- (“to wave, to weave”), said to be from the woven appearance of a weevil’s larval case, + *-el-, *-l̥- (diminutive or attributive suffix); see also wave and weave. Compare Old Saxon *wivil (“beetle”); Middle Low German wevel; Old High German wibil, wipil (modern German Wiebel (“beetle; chafer”)); Lithuanian vãbalas (“beetle; weevil”); Old Norse vifill, as in tordyfill (“dung beetle, scarab”) (whence Dutch tortwevel; Icelandic tordýfill, Norwegian tordivel, Old English tordwifel, Swedish tordyvel); dialectal Russian ве́блица (véblica, “intestinal worm”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.