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

centipede

UK/ˈsɛn.tɪ.pid/
nounB1+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,989 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: centipedes

A centipede is a long flat creature with one pair of legs per segment. A garden centipede, a fast centipede, a centipede under a stone.

None has a hundred legs, and the number is always odd in pairs — thirty and forty-two are common. It is a hunter, which is why it is fast, and the first pair of legs is a set of venomous claws. A millipede has two pairs per segment and eats plants.

Thomas Brown AfroBrazilian Warut Siriwut, Gregory D. Edgecombe, Chirasak Sutcharit, Piyoros Tongkerd, Somsak Panha Katja Schulz · CC BY-SA 4.0

Definitions of centipede

  1. 1nouncentipedeA long flat creature with one pair of legs per segment.B1+

    “A centipede scuttled out from under the stone on its many legs.”

centipede is a creature.

Where it comes from

Latin centipeda means hundred-foot — centum, a hundred, plus pes, a foot.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *ped-

  2. Latin

    centipeda

  3. French

    centipède

  4. English, today

    centipede

Built from

  • centi- · Latin — hundred
  • pēs · Latin — foot

From French centipède, from Latin centipeda, centipēs, from centi- (“hundred”) + pēs (“foot”); equivalent to centi + pede.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Insects & Sea Life

Practise this word

centipede in the wild

  • The primary objective is to shoot all the segments of a centipede that winds down the playing field.

    Centipede (video game)

  • Scolopendra gigantea, also known as the Peruvian giant yellow-leg centipede or Amazonian giant centipede, is a centipede in the genus Scolopendra.

    Scolopendra gigantea

  • At the same time, a population of mushrooms grows between the player and each centipede.

    Centipede (1998 video game)

  • The independent film concerns a deranged German surgeon who kidnaps three tourists and conjoins them surgically, mouth to anus, forming the eponymous "human centipede".

    The Human Centipede (First Sequence)

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.