Word.ws English Dictionary

cactophile

cactophile noun: an animal which lives in or feeds on cacti.

Noun

cactophile (plural cactophiles)

  1. An animal which lives in or feeds on cacti.
    • Other insects are cactophiles, including Homoptera such as the cactus dodger (Cacama valvata) […]1985, Hot Deserts and Arid Shrublands, Part 1, page 163
    • Phyllostomus discolor is an opportunistic cactophile that occasionally visits flowering columnar cacti in the Venezuelan Andes (Sosa and Soriano, 1996) .2002, Nancy B. Simmons, “Phylogeny and Convergence in Cactophilic Bats”, in Theodore H. Fleming, Alfonso Valiente-Banuet, editors, Columnar Cacti and Their Mutualists: Evolution, Ecology, and...
  2. A person who is especially fond of cacti.
    • As a group they present all of the challenges in collecting, classifying, and culturing cacti which the most ardent cactophile can desire.1984, Del Weniger, Cacti of Texas and Neighboring States: A Field Guide, page 159
    • I'm a cactophile yet my favorite plant (I define favorite as the one plant that will make me cry should it ever leave me for the great botanists in the sky) is a Haemantha albiflos.2005, Cactus and Succulent Journal, volume 77, numbers 1-6, page 56

Examples of cactophile in a sentence

  • Although not all cactophiles live in deserts, they and their host plants tend to inhabit dry regions.2003, Journal of Experimental Biology, volume 206, number 7, page 1185:
  • One look at it captures the imagination of every cactophile.2020, John Bagnasco, Bob Reidmuller Jr., Succulents: Choosing, Growing, and Caring for Cactuses and Other Succulents, page 112:

Forms of cactophile

pluralcactophiles

Origin of cactophile

From cacto- + -phile.

Questions about cactophile

What does cactophile mean?
Cactophile means an animal which lives in or feeds on cacti.
How do you use cactophile in a sentence?
Although not all cactophiles live in deserts, they and their host plants tend to inhabit dry regions.
What part of speech is cactophile?
Cactophile is a noun.
What is the plural of cactophile?
The plural of cactophile is cactophiles.

Words near cactophile in the dictionary

  1. cactinomycin
  2. cacto-
  3. cactoid
  4. cactoids
  5. cactomania
  6. cactophile
  7. cactophiles
  8. cactophilic
  9. cactophily
  10. cactus
  11. cactus cat

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cactophile (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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