Word.ws English Dictionary

blow-fly

blow-fly is the alternative form of blowfly.

Meaning of blowfly

Noun

blowfly (plural blowflies)

  1. Any of various flies of the family Calliphoridae that lay their eggs in rotting meat, dung, or open wounds.
    • The flies that troubled me most were a large kind of blue-bottle or blow-fly. These settled in swarms on my bird skins when first put out to dry, filling their plumage with masses of eggs, which, if neglected, the next day produced maggots.1869, Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, volume II, London: Macmillan and Co., page 329
    Synonyms:
    bottlefly, meat fly

Forms of blow-fly

pluralblow-flies

Questions about blow-fly

What is blow-fly the alternative form of?
Blow-fly is the alternative form of blowfly.

Words near blow-fly in the dictionary

  1. blow-dryer
  2. blow-dryers
  3. blow-drying
  4. blow-drys
  5. blow-flies
  6. blow-fly
  7. blow-hard
  8. blow-hards
  9. blow-horn
  10. blow-horns
  11. blow-in

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: blow-fly (page history and authors); blowfly (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: “blow-fly.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/blow-fly. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.