Word.ws English Dictionary

bdellatomy

bdellatomy noun: the snipping off the tail of a leech engaged in sucking human blood, in order to let the blood run out of it and so increase its powers of drawing blood.

Noun

bdellatomy (uncountable)

  1. (archaic) The snipping off the tail of a leech engaged in sucking human blood, in order to let the blood run out of it and so increase its powers of drawing blood.

Origin of bdellatomy

Irregularly formed as Ancient Greek βδέλλᾰ (bdéllă, “leech”) + -tomy (from -τομία (-tomía, “a cutting”); from τέμνω (témnō, “I cut”); the etymological spelling is bdellotomy.

Questions about bdellatomy

What does bdellatomy mean?
Bdellatomy means the snipping off the tail of a leech engaged in sucking human blood, in order to let the blood run out of it and so increase its powers of drawing blood.
What part of speech is bdellatomy?
Bdellatomy is a noun.

Words near bdellatomy in the dictionary

  1. BDCs
  2. BDD
  3. BDDs
  4. BDE
  5. Bde Maka Ska
  6. bdellatomy
  7. bdellid
  8. bdellids
  9. bdellin
  10. bdellins
  11. bdellion

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bdellatomy (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “bdellatomy.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bdellatomy. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.