red-toothed

English

Etymology

From red ‎ toothed.

Adjective

red-toothed

1. (zoology) Of an animal, having a reddish enamel at the tips of the teeth.
2. (literary, figurative, uncommon) Predatory and voracious.
   • 1839, “Coulter's Cruise”, in Blackwood's Magazine, Fishing Excerpts‎^[1], volume 3, page 330:

     to the guidance of his friend Rownaa, son and heir of the red-toothed monarch already described.

   • 1896, Emily Henrietta Hickey, Poems, page 17:

     The reason why, with hunger unstaunched, you have left your quarry behind; Red-toothed, red-mawed, foregone your meal! Sir Wolf, we'll know your mind!”

   • 1922, Horace Gordon Hutchinson, The Fortnightly Club, page 116:

     Apart from man, who has his anguish of the imagination, his torturing apprehensions and, thereto, his faculty for prolonging lives of pain and sickness, the ideal which Nature, unreasoning and red-toothed, has of life is this - a vivid, happy experience wrought to highest pitch, then the sudden death, the end coming in mid-course.

See also

• red in tooth and claw