Word.ws English Dictionary

flyspeck

flyspeck noun: housefly excrement, visible as a minuscule black dot.

Noun

flyspeck (plural flyspecks or flyspeck)

  1. Housefly excrement, visible as a minuscule black dot.
    • The wall of the kitchen above the fruitbowl was dotted with flyspeck.
  2. (broadly) Anything tiny or insignificant.
    • From the foothills below, Jean, Jan, and James were mere flyspecks, easily lost among the straggly pines that formed the treeline.
    • We passed through some flyspeck town, barely more than a gas station and a stoplight, but I never saw the name.

Verb

flyspeck (third-person singular simple present flyspecks, present participle flyspecking, simple past and past participle flyspecked)

  1. To bespeckle with tiny spatters of color.
    • To flyspeck, you need an old toothbrush, the paint color of your choice, glazing medium, a palette knife, and a mixing surface such as a palette or plastic container.2008, Priscilla Hauser, Priscilla Hauser's Book of Painting Patterns, →ISBN, page 15
  2. To inspect in minute detail to ensure that something contains no flaws; nitpick.
    • Your criticism will seem like flyspecking. They'll be mad at you for pointing out that there's more crime than they like to think, and especially mad that you're saying their own group—privileged middle-aged white males—are just as bad as young African-American inner-city toughs, walking the...1996, Richard Delgado, The Rodrigo Chronicles: Conversations About America and Race, →ISBN

Synonyms of flyspeck

30 more synonymsFewer synonyms

All synonyms of flyspeck

Forms of flyspeck

Noun
pluralflyspecks
pluralflyspeck
Verb
third-person singular presentflyspecks
present participleflyspecking
past participleflyspecked
pastflyspecked

Origin of flyspeck

From fly + speck.

Words formed from flyspeck

Questions about flyspeck

What does flyspeck mean?
Flyspeck means housefly excrement, visible as a minuscule black dot.
What part of speech is flyspeck?
Flyspeck can be a noun or a verb.
What is the plural of flyspeck?
The plural of flyspeck is flyspecks.

Words near flyspeck in the dictionary

  1. flyschoidal
  2. flyscreen
  3. flyscreens
  4. flysheet
  5. flysheets
  6. flyspeck
  7. flyspecked
  8. flyspecking
  9. flyspecks
  10. flyspray
  11. flysprays

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: flyspeck (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Wodencafe-flyspeck.wav.

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