Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

aphid

UK/ˈeɪ.fɪd/US/ˈeɪ.fɪd/
nounB2+Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #14,086 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: aphids

An aphid is a tiny sap-sucking insect that swarms on rose stems. Aphids on the roses, spray the aphids, a colony of aphids.

They breed without mating for most of the year and are born already pregnant, which is how a few become thousands in a fortnight. Ants farm them for the sweet honeydew they excrete.

Alvesgaspar · CC BY-SA 4.0

Definitions of aphid

  1. 1nounaphidA tiny sap-sucking insect that swarms on rose stems.B2+

    “Ladybirds are great for the garden because they eat aphids.”

aphid is an insect.

Where it comes from

From New Latin aphis, coined by Linnaeus in 1758; his reason for the name is unknown.

  1. Ancient Greek

    κορις — bug

  2. New Latin

    aphis

  3. English, today

    aphid

Built from

  • ἀ- · Ancient Greek — not
  • φείδομαι · Ancient Greek — to spare, be thrifty, be merciful

From New Latin aphis (plural aphides), coined by Carl Linnaeus in 1758. His inspiration for the name remains unknown; OED suggests it might stem from a misreading of Ancient Greek κορις (“bug”) (see diagram), in which case the nominative -ις suffix was reanalyzed as -ις; while AHD suggests a connection to Ancient Greek ἀφειδής (“unsparing, lavishly borrowed”) in reference to the insects' voracity or rapid rate of production, from ἀ- (“not”) + φείδομαι (“to spare, be thrifty, be merciful”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European bʰeyd- (“to split”). a doublet of aphis.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Insects & Sea Life

Practise this word

aphid in the wild

  • The group includes the fluffy white woolly aphids.

    Aphid

  • About 5,000 species of aphid have been described, all included in the family Aphididae.

    Aphid

  • The family is composed of species associated with pine, spruce, or other conifers, known respectively as "pine aphids" or "spruce aphids".

    Adelgidae

  • Unlike aphids, the adelgids have no tail-like cauda and no cornicles.

    Adelgidae

  • Cabbage aphids, from the genus Brevicoryne of the family Aphididae, are grayish-green, but a waxy covering gives them a grayish-white to powdery blue appearance.

    Brevicoryne brassicae

1 / 3

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.