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millipede

US/ˈmɪləpid/
nounB2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechleans written

Other forms: millipedes

A millipede is a long round creature with two pairs of legs per segment. A millipede under the log.

None has a thousand legs, and the record is about seven hundred and fifty. A millipede eats dead leaves and curls up rather than biting anything.

Golovatch, S.; Mikhaljova, E.; Chang, H.Hedin, MarshalIoannou, N. VandenSpiegel, D., Golovatch, S.Chen, C.; Golovatch, S.; Chang, H.JoydeepStoev, P.; Akkari, N.; Enghoff, H.Akkari, N.USGS Native Bee Inventory and Monitoring Laboratory Collage created by Animalparty · CC BY 4.0

Definitions of millipede

  1. 1nounmillipedeA long round creature that curls up, with two pairs of legs per segment.B2

    “A millipede under the flowerpot curled into a spiral.”

millipede is a creature.

Where it comes from

Latin millipeda is mille, a thousand, plus pes, a foot.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *ped-

  2. Latin

    mīllipeda — wood louse

  3. English, today

    millipede

Built from

  • mīlle · Latin — thousand
  • pedis · Latin — foot

From Latin mīllipeda (“wood louse”), from mīlle (“thousand”) + pēs, pedis (“foot”), equivalent to milli- + -pede.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Insects & Sea Life

Practise this word

millipede in the wild

  • Most millipedes have very elongated cylindrical or flattened bodies with more than 20 segments, while pill millipedes are shorter and can roll into a tight ball.

    Millipede

  • Most millipedes are slow-moving detritivores, eating decaying leaves and other dead plant matter; however, some eat fungi or drink plant fluid.

    Millipede

  • Millipede (stylized as millipede in western releases and as Milli-Pede in Japan) is a 1982 fixed shooter video game developed and published by Atari, Inc. for arcades.

    Millipede (video game)

  • IBM demonstrated a prototype millipede storage device at CeBIT 2005, and was trying to make the technology commercially available by the end of 2007.

    Millipede memory

  • Pill millipedes are any members of two living (and one extinct) orders of millipedes, often grouped together into a single superorder, Oniscomorpha.

    Pill millipede

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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.

Related words

the mīlle family

mile

millipede — used too rare to measure · point at the bar for the others