white ant
noun
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white ant
1 Americannoun
white-ant
2
American
[hwahyt-ant, wahyt-]
/ ˈʰwaɪtˌænt, ˈwaɪt- /
verb (used with object)
Australian Informal.
white ant
British
noun
Etymology
Origin of white ant1
First recorded in 1675–85
Origin of white-ant2
First recorded in 1915–20
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.
See Examples For:
Oddly enough, this tribal art owes much of its vitality to the wood-eating white ant of Africa.
From Time Magazine Archive
There are white ant hills like ragged heaps of raw chocolate—very hard and strong.
From From Edinburgh to India & Burmah by Burn Murdoch, W. G. (William Gordon)
They enter the infected house in large numbers, leaving a reserve force behind, and promptly destroy every white ant in the place.
From The Pearl of India by Ballou, Maturin Murray
You can tell infallibly the points of the compass from the mounds of this white ant, which has been called the “meridian termite.”
From Peeps At Many Lands: Australia by Spence, Percy F. S. (Percy Frederick Seaton)
Borers riddled the pages of his books; and the white ant, as greedy for wood pulp as a paper baron, was constantly sapping and mining the underpinnings of his house.
From From Place to Place by Cobb, Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury)
Some Chinese love earthworm broth, and Zanzibaris feast on white-ant pie; the French have been known to eat eels with sea-urchin-gonad sauce, and some Hawaiians have a taste for broiled puppy.
From The New Yorker ● Nov. 18, 2019
To every hundred workers in a white-ant colony, which numbers many thousands of individuals, there are perhaps two of these fighting men.
From Library of the World's Best literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 12 by Various
In the same spirit his companions speak of their white-ant existence without a shade of complaint.
From War by Loti, Pierre
Fortunately every few score of paces there stood white-ant hillocks, sometimes between ten and twenty feet high.
From In Desert and Wilderness by Sienkiewicz, Henryk
Among the white-ant hillocks shot upwards here and there euphorbias, with boughs like the arms of a candle-stick.
From In Desert and Wilderness by Sienkiewicz, Henryk
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.
