weasel [OE] The sneaky characteristics of this animal were not transferred to people until the late 16th century, although it was used as someone’s nickname in the 13th century. Its bad reputation comes from the belief that weasels creep into birds’ nests and suck the contents out of their eggs, leaving the empty shell behind. This lies behind the originally US phrase weasel words [E20th] for words used to reduce the force of a concept being expressed; the more general verb sense ‘extricate’ (‘weaselled his way out of doing the chores’) developed from this in the 1920s.