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wingless

wingless

2 3.5
Not having parts that let birds or insects fly
  • adjective
  • /ˈwɪŋləs/
translation icon : sin alas
  • All known firefly larvae, which are wingless and mostly live on the ground and under bark, are fascinating to observe.

Examples

  • Here and there above it, more people were ascending, tiny wingless angels rising into the sky against the blue of the ocean.

    Fiction book (1998)
  • For a wingless insect, you're alright by me.

    Fiction book (1998)
  • Perhaps I was watching the flight of some wingless bird; perhaps I was sending off a doomed torpedo.

    Fiction book (1992)
  • A wingless disc was seen cavorting in the skies above California by an Air Force captain and his wife.

    Fiction book (2001)
  • Like a wingless dove.

    Fiction book (1997)
  • The wingless male wasps emerge first and mate with the gall-enclosed females.

    Academic text (2005)
  • Horrified, they saw it come, something big, reddish, and unreasonable—a wingless bird.

    Fiction book (1995)
  • Throughout the great diversity of living ant species, for example, the coexistence of winged reproductive females and wingless worker females is a basic trait of colonial life.

    Academic text (2008)
  • The midge is a small, wingless fly that spends most of its two-year larval stage frozen in the Antarctic ice.

  • I discovered a wingless insect crawling on the leaf, which surprised me because I had never seen one before.

Synonyms

apteral
vswingless
  • Specialized
9.9

An insect that has no wings

is identical in meaning but differs in word form
apterous
vswingless
  • Specialized
9.9

An insect with no wings

has the same meaning but is a variant form of the term

Antonyms

31 3.9

With parts like feathers or thin flaps that help something fly

How Winged

winged
31 3.9
wingless
2 3.5

Surface Forms

wingless positive

Morphology

wingless = wing (transparent) = wing + less

Meaning is directly derived from 'wing' + '-less' as 'not having wings', a standard and predictable suffixation.

Etymology

Wingless is made of wing and -less, where wing is the part of a bird or insect and -less means 'without', just like in hopeless ('without hope'). So wingless simply means 'without wings', which is why we use it for animals or stages that do not have wings.