Small wild animals or pests considered annoying or destructive, used informally or in rural dialects.
From 'vermin' (Old French 'vermine', from Latin 'vermis' meaning worm) with a dialectal suffix. The spelling 'varmint' became prominent in American frontier speech as a casual, tough-sounding variant.
The word 'varmint' is almost entirely American frontier slang—it's how Wild West characters talked, and it's so tied to 19th-century frontier mythology that hearing it activates cultural movie memories, showing how individual words can become iconic props in historical narratives.
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