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• white ant
  white ant

  noun

  termite.
• white-ant
  white-ant

  verb (used with object)

  to undermine or subvert from within.

white ant

¹ American  

noun

1. termite.

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white-ant ² American  

[hwahyt-ant, wahyt-] / ˈʰwaɪtˌænt, ˈwaɪt- /

verb (used with object)

Australian Informal.

1. to undermine or subvert from within.

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white ant British  

noun

1. another name for termite

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Etymology

Origin of white ant¹

First recorded in 1675–85

Origin of white-ant²

First recorded in 1915–20

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

white ant white-ant

Oddly enough, this tribal art owes much of its vitality to the wood-eating white ant of Africa.

From Time Magazine Archive

And yet the white ant can never procure any food until it comes above ground.

From Library of the World's Best literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 12 by Various

One is prone to query what the white ant was created for.

From The Pearl of India by Maturin Murray Ballou

In addition, the party of explorers found their animals woefully bitten by the tsetse fly, rhinoceroses and elephants were too plentiful to be interesting, and the great white ant made itself tiresome.

From A Book of Discovery The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest Times to the Finding of the South Pole by M. B. (Margaret Bertha) Synge

The termite or white ant is a small insect, with a bloated, yellowish-white body, and a somewhat large thorax, oblong-shaped, and colored a disagreeable oily brown.

From Library of the World's Best literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 12 by Various

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

I took my position behind a white-ant hill in front of a stream which rippled in a hollow about forty yards beneath me.

From Ismailia by Sir Samuel White Baker

The small white-ant nests from two to five feet high were very numerous; at 12.40 p.m. a slight depression in the country was observed, and limestone appeared, and deep hollows were frequent.

From Journals of Australian Explorations by Augustus Charles Gregory

This fire-proof building was roofed with a thick cement of clay from the white-ant hills, that had been tempered for some weeks and mixed with chopped straw.

From Ismailia by Sir Samuel White Baker

I frequently took them away from camp and made them guess the distance in paces from some particular object, such as a tree, or white-ant hill.

From Ismailia by Sir Samuel White Baker