Word.ws English Dictionary

horse-fly

horse-fly is the alternative form of horsefly.

Meaning of horsefly

Noun

horsefly (plural horseflies)

  1. Any of several medium to large flies, of the family Tabanidae, that suck the blood of mammals (not to be confused with Stomoxys calcitrans, the stable fly, or dog fly).
    • It was not a horsefly and it was not a deerfly; it was bigger than either.2017, Neil Gaiman, Norse Mythology, Bloomsbury Publishing, page 36
    Synonyms:
    cleg, breezefly, gadfly, stoat-fly, stout

Forms of horse-fly

pluralhorse-flies

Questions about horse-fly

What is horse-fly the alternative form of?
Horse-fly is the alternative form of horsefly.

Words near horse-fly in the dictionary

  1. horse-drawn
  2. horse-drench
  3. horse-drenches
  4. horse-faced
  5. horse-flies
  6. horse-fly
  7. horse-godmother
  8. horse-godmothers
  9. horse-head fiddle
  10. horse-head fiddles
  11. horse-heal

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: horse-fly (page history and authors); horsefly (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: “horse-fly.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/horse-fly. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.