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  1. inquiline love

Definitions

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

  1. n. An animal that characteristically lives commensally in the nest, burrow, or dwelling place of an animal of another species.
  2. adj. Being or living as an inquiline.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. n. In zoology, an animal that lives in an abode properly belonging to another, either at its expense, as certain insects that live in galls made by the true gall-insects, or merely as a cotenant, as a pea-crab which lives in an oyster-shell, or a sea-anemone growing on a crab's back; a commensal. See cut under cancrisocial.
  2. Having the character of an inquiline; commensal.

Wiktionary

  1. n. biology An animal that lives commensally in the nest, burrow, gall, or dwelling place of an animal of another species.
  2. n. biology An organism that lives within a reservoir of water collected in the hollow of a plant stem or leaf.

GNU Webster's 1913

  1. n. (Zoöl.) A gallfly which deposits its eggs in galls formed by other insects.

Etymologies

  1. From Latin inquilīnus ("tenant, lodger") (Wiktionary)
  2. Latin inquilīnus, lodger, tenant : in-, in; see in-2 + colere, to inhabit; see kwel-1 in Indo-European roots. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)

Examples

  • “A cross-grained trapper with murty odd oogs, awflorated ares, inquiline nase and a twithcherous mouph?”

    Finnegans Wake

  • “The diminutive inquiline snailfish (Liparis inquilinus”

    Warren Ellis

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reverse dictionary (15)

Words that contain this word in their definition

  1. inquilinous
  2. guest
  3. ecitophile
  1. guest-bee
  2. pseudo-parasite
  3. pseudoparasitic
  1. guest-fly
  2. inquiline
  3. commensal
  1. guest-moth
  2. host
  3. magilus
  1. sapygidæ
  2. apathus
  3. inquilinity

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Comments

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  • yarb As with Leoptothorax, the workers have come to possess three simple eyes, and to take on other queen-like features. The effect on the inquiline has gone further here, however, for the male has lost its wings, and begun to assume the appearance, although apparently not the function, of a worker...

    - Caryl P. Haskins, Of Ants and Men, 1939, p. 192 Dec 17, 2008

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‘inquiline’ has been looked up 965 times, loved by 5 people, added to 15 lists, commented on 1 time, and has a Scrabble score of 18.