Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun Any of various terrestrial isopod crustaceans of the suborder Oniscidea, having a gray or brown oval segmented body and commonly found in damp places such as under logs. Some woodlice can roll into a ball.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A
terrestrial isopod crustacean (suborderOniscoidea ) with a rigid, segmentedexoskeleton , often capable of being rolled into a ball, found in damp, dark places, and feeding only on dead plant matter, usually lives under stones or bark.
Etymologies
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Examples
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Other names have evolved more colloquially and imaginatively: the Armadillidium is also variously known as a woodlouse, gramfy-gravy, pill bug, roly-poly, monkey pea or cheesy bug.
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Sadly, I've always believed that actions speak several billion times louder than words - which is why my ego tends more towards the 'woodlouse' end of the spectrum.
Archive 2009-01-01 juliette 2009
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Sadly, I've always believed that actions speak several billion times louder than words - which is why my ego tends more towards the 'woodlouse' end of the spectrum.
Dial M for Munter juliette 2009
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That is the name of one kind of ‘pill bug’, which is a crustacean, a woodlouse, related to shrimps but living on land – where it betrays its recent aquatic ancestry by breathing with gills, which have to be kept moist.
THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH RICHARD DAWKINS 2009
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Yet one is a modified woodlouse, while the other is a modified modified in the same direction millipede.
THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH RICHARD DAWKINS 2009
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Maybe the idea is for the writer to let us to know that she lives at a similar pitch of intensity to Sylvia Plath and, by implication, that her life is so much more interesting and fulfilled than our dreary little woodlouse-like meanderings.
Smoking Guns and the Morality of Parliamentary Privilege 2009
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A mentally retarded woodlouse would have a job to make a worse mess than GB.
John Rentoul today puts Trevor Kavanagh and myself in the... 2009
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The pill millipede has two pairs of legs on most segments, the pill woodlouse only one.
THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH RICHARD DAWKINS 2009
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The pill millipede has two pairs of legs on most segments, the pill woodlouse only one.
THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH RICHARD DAWKINS 2009
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The resemblance to a woodlouse is superficial – convergent.
THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH RICHARD DAWKINS 2009
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