Word.ws English Dictionary

epigeic

epigeic adjective: living on the surface of the land.

Adjective

epigeic (not comparable)

  1. Living on the surface of the land.
    • Our large dataset on epigaeic ant abundances is complemented by a second, smaller dataset of 24 published studies on arboreal ant abundances.2022 September 19, Schultheiss et al., “The abundance, biomass, and distribution of ants on Earth”, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, page 1, column 1
  2. Living in the topsoil and depositing wormcasts on the surface.

Forms of epigeic

alternative formepigaeic

Origin of epigeic

From French épigé + -ic. Épigé, first applied in the context of earthworms by Marcel Bouché (see anecic), is from Ancient Greek ἐπίγειος (epígeios, “terrestrial”).

Questions about epigeic

What does epigeic mean?
Epigeic means living on the surface of the land.
What part of speech is epigeic?
Epigeic is an adjective.

Words near epigeic in the dictionary

  1. epigeal
  2. epigean
  3. epigeans
  4. epigee
  5. epigees
  6. epigeic
  7. epigene
  8. epigeneses
  9. epigenesis
  10. epigenesist
  11. epigenesists

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: epigeic (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: “epigeic.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/epigeic. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.