teredo
Americannoun
noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of teredo
1350–1400; Middle English < Latin terēdō < Greek terēdṓn wood-boring worm
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:
Matters reached crisis-point in the early 1980s, when it was discovered that the enormous wooden piles which hold up the entire structure were infested with teredo shipworm.
From BBC ● Sep. 11, 2021
Quatrefages proposed to destroy the teredo in harbors by impregnating the water with a mineral solution fatal to them.
From The Earth as Modified by Human Action by Marsh, George P.
It was expected that the double solution, by forming an insoluble compound, would prove an effective protection against the teredo.
From Scientific American Supplement, No. 514, November 7, 1885 by Various
Then the hull of the vessel was unprotected, and the teredo, or ship worm, bored it through and through, until nothing but careening and caulking could save the poor craft from sinking.
From The West Indies and the Spanish Main by Rodway, James
There have been discovered many pieces of wood, containing holes drilled by the teredo, and thus shewing that they had been long drifted about in the ocean before being entombed at the bottom.
From Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation by Chambers, Robert
The seven plagues of California’s piers are fire, ocean storms, fire, old age, civic budgets, ship worms called teredos, and fire.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 5, 2024
The park, with a heavily used soccer pitch and riverfront walk, sits on century-old timbers that were riddled with shipworms, or teredos, tiny mollusks that bore into wood.
From New York Times ● Feb. 8, 2011
But now it is time to show another set of teredos, who burrowed and swarmed in the government offices where the principal scenes of our present study took place.
From Bureaucracy by Wormeley, Katharine Prescott
The piles that supported the wharves often needed renewing, being eaten by teredos.
From Out of the Triangle: a story of the Far East by Bamford, Mary E. (Mary Ellen)
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.
