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parasitic

UK/ˌpæɹ.əˈsɪt.ɪk/US/ˌpɛɹ.əˈsɪt.ɪk/
adjectiveC2Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,788 of 15,258leans written

Parasitic means living off another creature and giving nothing back. A parasitic worm.

A successful parasite does not kill its host, which is why the nastiest ones are usually new arrivals. Calling a person or a business parasitic is one of the harder insults in English.

Marco Vinci · CC BY-SA 3.0

Definitions of parasitic

  1. 1adjectiveparasiticLiving off another creature and giving nothing back.C2

    “The parasitic infection took four months to identify.”

parasitic is a quality.

Where it comes from

  1. Latin

    parasītus

  2. Middle French

    parasite

  3. English

    parasite

  4. English, today

    parasitic

Built from

  • παρά · Ancient Greek — beside
  • σῖτος · Ancient Greek — food

From parasite + -ic. parasite comes from Middle French parasite, from Latin parasītus. From Middle French parasite, from Latin parasitus, from Ancient Greek παράσιτος (“person who eats at the table of another”), from noun use of adjective meaning "feeding beside", from παρά (“beside”) + σῖτος (“food”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

parasitic in the wild

  • Ridley Scott's 1979 film Alien was one of many works of science fiction to feature a parasitic alien species.

    Parasitism

  • All objects experience parasitic drag, regardless of whether they generate lift.

    Parasitic drag

  • In parasitic twins, one ceases development during gestation and is vestigial to a mostly fully formed, otherwise healthy individual twin.

    Parasitic twin

  • There have been no known records of a parasitic twin that has been able to speak.

    Parasitic twin

  • The evolutionary strategy relieves the parasitic parents from the investment of rearing young.

    Brood parasitism

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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 parasite family

parasiteparasitic

parasitic — used about once every 7,127 pages · #10,788 · point at the bar for the others