Old English, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch vos and German Fuchs.

• An Old English word that is related to German Fuchs. As well as featuring in folklore (see grapes) it is also a traditional quarry of hunters. Oscar Wilde described ‘The English country gentleman galloping after a fox—the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable’. Today the fox is as much an urban animal as a rural one, and its meaning has also shifted significantly. The US sense ‘an attractive woman’ is first recorded in the early 1960s, but the related adjective foxy was used before the First World War. This is an unusual development, in that fox is strictly masculine, the female being a vixen (Late Middle English). The two words are not as far apart as they might at first seem. Vixen was originally fixen, but in the past, as today, in the West Country an ‘f’ was often pronounced as a ‘v’, given vox and vixen and for some reason the West Country form stuck for the female. In the late 16th century vixen came to be a term for a bad-tempered woman (otherwise a shrew) so was not available for the new, sexual, sense. Foxed to describe a book with brownish spots on it dates from the mid 19th century and comes from the colour of the spots matching the reddish-brown of the animal.