Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- v. To produce a shrill grating, chirping, or hissing sound by rubbing body parts together, as certain insects do.
- v. To produce by rubbing body parts together: "The crickets stridulated their everlasting monotonous meaningful note” ( John Updike).
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- To make a stridulous noise, as an insect; effect stridulation, as the cicada; grate, scrape, or creak with the organs of stridulation; shrill; chirr.
Wiktionary
- v. To make a high-pitched chirping, grating, hissing, or squeaking sound, as male crickets and grasshoppers do, by rubbing certain body parts together.
GNU Webster's 1913
- v. To make a shrill, creaking noise. to make a shrill or musical sound, such as is made by the males of many insects.
WordNet 3.0
- v. make a shrill creaking noise by rubbing together special bodily structures
Etymologies
- From Latin strīdulus, stridulous; see stridulous.
Examples
“When disturbed by a would be attacker the caterpillars stridulate by rubbing their mouth parts together, creating broadband chirps spanning from 3.7-55.1 kHz.”
Caterpillars Utilize Sound and Stench As Defense | Impact Lab
“It required a considerable effort on the thranx's part not to stridulate wildly as he entered.”
Diuturnity's Dawn
“Many insects stridulate by rubbing together specially modified parts of their hard integuments.”
“I then removed the antennæ of the male, and again made the female stridulate; the male heard her, and at once crawled toward her, although his antennæ were entirely removed.”
“These factors set them very far apart from their Latin-derived associates, which are uniformly multisyllabic and which have differing noun and verb forms, for example: latrate (like a dog) and latration; stridulate (like a cricket or grasshopper) and stridulation; and ululate (like a dog, jackal, wolf, or owl) and ululation.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘stridulate’.
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see ulater, alligator
Discombobulate-enkindled 'ulate' words.
discombobulate, undulate, perambulate, ululate, tabulate, postulate, particulate, articulate, inarticulate, populate, manipulate, capitulate and 95 more...
yarb A window was open, and the crickets were stridulating at an ominous speed in the black motionless foliage.
- Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor. May 17, 2008
fbharjo lets make a racket, jacket May 12, 2008