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thunderfly

noun

Etymology

From thunder + fly.

  1. derived from *plewk-✻
  2. inherited from *fleugǭ✻
  3. inherited from *fleugā✻
  4. inherited from flȳġe
  5. inherited from flye
  6. compounded as thunderfly — “thunder + fly”

Definitions

  1. Any insect of the genus Thrips.

    • Meanwhile at the Conference Centre three fire-engines have screamed up. Not, for once, a student smoking in a bedroom: this time a cloud of thunderflies has chosen to swarm on the pearly-pink just-warm globe of a smoke-detector.
    • ‘[…] I remember how we had to make for the boat quickly because of the thunderflies.’ / ‘Thunderflies?’ / ‘Biting midges that could make your life a hell. And the mosquitoes too. We called them buzzers because of the sound they made.[…]’

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for thunderfly. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA