insect
Americannoun
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any animal of the class Insecta, comprising small, air-breathing arthropods having the body divided into three parts (head, thorax, and abdomen), and having three pairs of legs and usually two pairs of wings.
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any small arthropod, such as a spider, tick, or centipede, having a superficial, general similarity to the insects.
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a contemptible or unimportant person.
adjective
noun
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any small air-breathing arthropod of the class Insecta, having a body divided into head, thorax, and abdomen, three pairs of legs, and (in most species) two pairs of wings. Insects comprise about five sixths of all known animal species, with a total of over one million named species
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(loosely) any similar invertebrate, such as a spider, tick, or centipede
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a contemptible, loathsome, or insignificant person
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Any of very numerous, mostly small arthropods of the class Insecta, having six segmented legs in the adult stage and a body divided into three parts (the head, thorax, and abdomen). The head has a pair of antennae and the thorax usually has one or two pairs of wings. Most insects undergo substantial change in form during development from the young to the adult stage. More than 800,000 species are known, most of them beetles. Other insects include flies, bees, ants, grasshoppers, butterflies, cockroaches, aphids, and silverfish.
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See Notes at biomass bug entomology
Other Word Forms
- insect-like adjective
- insectean adjective
- insectival adjective
- noninsect noun
Etymology
Origin of insect
First recorded in 1595–1605; from Latin insectum, noun use of neuter of insectus, past participle of insecāre “to incise, cut”; translation of Greek éntomon “insect,” literally, “notched or incised one”; entomo-; segment
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
This indicates that their diet -- nectar, grain, insects and even other vertebrates -- contained significant amounts of ethanol.
From Science Daily
“Out in the wild, they’re trying to build up their calories through berries and insects. But when they come across garbage in a neighborhood, that’s all the calories they need in one spot.”
From Los Angeles Times
"Whether it's that time we stepped on a nail and or got cellulitis following an insect bite or our C-section wound, or our UTI, or our STI - we all depend on them," she said.
From BBC
A cluster of the insects is even known as a loveliness of ladybugs.
Nearby are additional puzzling landscapes in which other Lilliputian figures, at times the scale of insects, feel overwhelmed by outsize vegetation.
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
