Wyvern folklore is rarely fire-breathing like the four-legged dragon. Sometimes modern fantasy book and media authors have wyverns that are frost-breathing or poison-breathing instead of fire-breathing. The current spelling "wyvern" is not attested before the seventeenth century as "winged two-footed dragon". According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it is an alteration of Middle English "wyver" (attested thirteenth century), from Anglo-French "wivre" (cf. French "guivre" and "vouivre"), which originate from Latin "vīpera", meaning "viper", "adder", or "asp". Conversely, medievalist William Sayers proposes a more complex origin for the term. He notes that the Anglo-French "guivre" and its Middle English derivative ceased to
Wyvern as the rivers Wye and Severn run through Hereford and Worcester respectively. A local radio station was formerly called Wyvern FM. Vauxhall Motors had a model in its range in the 1950s called the Wyvern. The Westland Wyvern was a British single-seat carrier-based multi-role strike aircraft built by Westland Aircraft that served in the 1950s, seeing active service in the 1956 Suez Crisis. The wyvern is a frequent mascot of athletic teams, colleges and universities, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States, and is the mascot of the Korea Baseball Organization team SK Wyverns, established in 2000, and