Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Feeding on or obtaining nutrition from wood.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Wood-eating; habitually feeding upon wood; lignivorous, as an insect. See
Cis (with cut). - Perforating and destroying as if eating timber, as a mollusk or a crustacean.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Eating, boring in, or destroying, wood; -- said especially of certain insect larvæ, crustaceans, and mollusks.
- adjective Of or pertaining to the genus Xylophaga.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective
Feeding onwood . (of insects etc.) - adjective
Destructive to wood. (of fungi etc.)
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
From xylo- (wood) and suffix -phagous
Support
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Examples
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Same with lignivorous/xylophagous, herbivorous/phytophagous, and of course carnivorous/sarcophagous.
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Water temperature relations primitive xylophagous cockroach Cryptocercus punctulatus Scudder (Dictyoptera - Cryptocercidae)
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It's a veritable feast, so check the duration of your mortgage because what you're buying is fast becoming food for powder post beetles, carpenter ants, carpenter bees and other xylophagous organisms (wood eaters).
The Berkeley Daily Planet, The East Bay's Independent Newspaper 2008
reesetee commented on the word xylophagous
Destroying or boring into wood.
September 14, 2007