Word.ws English Dictionary

footganger

footganger noun: a juvenile locust or grasshopper while in its wingless or flightless phase.

Noun

footganger (plural footgangers)

  1. A juvenile locust or grasshopper while in its wingless or flightless phase.
    • Midway between Bloomfontein and Kimberley, while riding with Major Beresford, of the South African Constabulary, at the foot of some low hills in the Karoo bush, I came across great numbers of the footgangers.1902, Journal of the Society of Arts
    • We passed several swarms of locusts in the footganger stage; but owing to the lateness of their appearance the damage they effected was slight, though we met many people coming from the west, whose crops had been utterly destroyed.1904, Mark Sykes, John Hugh Smith, Edward Granville Browne, Dar-ul-Islam: A Record of a Journey Through Ten of the Asiatic Provinces of Turkey

Forms of footganger

pluralfootgangers
alternative formfoot-ganger

Origin of footganger

Perhaps from Dutch or Afrikaans voetganger (“pedestrian”, literally “foot-goer”), or a partial calque of German Fußgänger (“pedestrian”), equivalent to foot + ganger (“goer, walker, stepper”).

Questions about footganger

What does footganger mean?
Footganger means a juvenile locust or grasshopper while in its wingless or flightless phase.
What part of speech is footganger?
Footganger is a noun.
What is the plural of footganger?
The plural of footganger is footgangers.

Words near footganger in the dictionary

  1. footfuckers
  2. footfucking
  3. footfucks
  4. footful
  5. footfuls
  6. footganger
  7. footgangers
  8. footgear
  9. footgeld
  10. footglove
  11. footgloves

Source and license

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