Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. An ant.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. An ant or emmet.
Wiktionary
- n. An ant.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. An ant, or emmet.
WordNet 3.0
- n. social insect living in organized colonies; characteristically the males and fertile queen have wings during breeding season; wingless sterile females are the workers
Etymologies
- Middle English pissemyre : pisse, urine (from the smell of the formic acid that ants secrete); see piss + mire, ant (probably of Scandinavian origin; akin to Danish myre).
Examples
“Scared of an Internet troll with a pismire sized brain and an overlarge mouth?”
“Since I am not ready to rule out anything; even the preposterous idea that a pismire may indeed carry off a saw log; I would not absolutely rule out some general correlation between skin color and intelligence.”
“So vast is the disproportion between the sky of law and the pismire of performance under it, that whether he is a man of worth or a sot is not so great a matter as we say.”
“The little pismire tried to have me arrested and confined, but I escaped him using two of my sigils.”
Conqueror's Moon
“I saw him as a small-minded pismire, and when he tried to yank, I gnawed chunks out of him.”
Rogue Warrior
“Now we'll see how well you hide, you insolent little pismire!”
The Golden Torc
“Urad, trembling and sighing at her danger, forgot not to drop one of her peppercorns, and immediately she found herself changed into a pismire, and with great pleasure she looked for a hole in the ground, and crept into it.”
“Urad, perceiving that they were gone, wished herself into her original form, but alas! her wish was not granted, and the once beautiful Urad still continued an ugly pismire.”
“The poison of the little pismire working in their eyes, in a short time occasioned them to awake in the utmost tortures; and perceiving they were blind, and feeling the pain, they each supposed his neighbour had blinded him in order to get away with the booty.”
“Then the little pismire the emote, taking pitty of her great difficulty and labour, cursing the cruellnesse of the daughter of”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘pismire’.
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Logolepsy
"Luciferous Logolepsy is a collection of over 9,000 obscure English words. Though the definition of an 'English' word might seem to be straightforward, it is not. There exist so many adopted, deriv...
Anschauung, Areopagus, Argus, Briarean, Dei gratia, Dei judicium, Deo volente, Duecento, Foehn, Geflugelte Worte, Gegenschein, Hakenkreuz and 9230 more...
hernesheir cf. pisant Jan 1, 2009
muamor "He is an angry as a pissemyre,
Though þat he haue al that he kan desire."
Chaucer.
Pismire + ant = pissant. Mar 4, 2008
oroboros See formicate. Jun 21, 2007