Pronounced: (as it sounds), noun
Notes: I know the story of Sleeping Beauty, but I didn’t know it was a word
Yesterday’s word
The word wyvern is “a mythical animal usually represented as a two-legged winged creature resembling a dragon”
First usage
Our word came into English in the early 1600s
Background / Comments
The creature called a wyvern looks a bit like a dragon, except that dragons have four legs, and a wyvern has two legs. Our word came from the Latin word vipera (viper) — and that is why many depictions of wyverns have them with the tail of a viper. Originally, our word referred to a huge serpent rather than dragon-like creature.
Richard's Vocabulary Word-of-the-Day 