Word.ws English Dictionary

doryphore

doryphore noun: a petty pedant, a person who complains about minor mistakes.

Noun

doryphore (plural doryphores)

  1. (humorous, rare) A petty pedant, a person who complains about minor mistakes.
    • Often have I tried to supplement my vocabulary by inventing words, such as ‘couth’, or ‘doriphore’, or ‘hypoulic’, feeling that it is the duty as well as the pastime of a professional writer to make two words bloom where only one bloomed before.1952 August 22, Harold Nicolson, Spectator, page 238
    • The idiomatic implications of such a word as doryphore in his own text is left for the ignorant to guess. (It means a Colorado beetle and, hence, a pest.)1960 December 9, Daily Telegraph, page 19

Forms of doryphore

pluraldoryphores
alternative formdoriphore

Origin of doryphore

A modification of doriphore, borrowed from French doryphore (“Colorado beetle”) by Harold Nicolson in 1952, presumably under the influence of the various senses of pest. The French term was a translation of the New Latin genus Doryphora, itself from Ancient Greek δορυφόρος (doruphóros, “lance-bearing; lance-bearer”).

Questions about doryphore

What does doryphore mean?
Doryphore means a petty pedant, a person who complains about minor mistakes.
What part of speech is doryphore?
Doryphore is a noun.
What is the plural of doryphore?
The plural of doryphore is doryphores.

Words near doryphore in the dictionary

  1. dorylines
  2. dorylomorph
  3. dorylomorphs
  4. doryman
  5. dorymen
  6. doryphore
  7. doryphores
  8. doryphoroi
  9. doryphoros
  10. Dorys
  11. dorzolamide

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: doryphore (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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