Biomimetics and creatures could contribute to novel design inspirations for wave energy converter as to other engineering branches since we have seen numerous examples in engineering applications. But how to obtain valuable biological entities or bionic design cases that could produce inspirations for novel designs may be challenging for the designers of wave energy converters (WECs). This research work carries out a preliminary research on acquiring the biological entities for designers, so to obtain the innovative bio-inspired ideas for designing novel WECs. In the proposed method, the first step is to draw out the engineering terminologies based on the functions, structures and energy extraction principles of existing WECs. Then by applying ‘WordNet’, the candidate biological terminologies can be obtained. Next, using ‘AskNature’ and through manual selection and filtering, the biological terminologies can be acquired. Lastly, to use the biological terminologies to establish the reference biological entities and the information and knowledge so for designing an innovative WEC. Using the proposed methodology, a novel WEC was conceived and verified.