Word.ws English Dictionary

lovebug

lovebug noun: an insect, the honeymoon fly (Plecia nearctica, family Biblionidae), native to Central America and the southeastern United States.

lovebug: an insect, the honeymoon fly (Plecia nearctica, family Biblionidae), native to Central America and...
Image: Wikifrosch, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

lovebug (plural lovebugs)

  1. An insect, the honeymoon fly (Plecia nearctica, family Biblionidae), native to Central America and the southeastern United States.
  2. An insect native to subtropical regions of south-eastern China, Taiwan, and Japan (Plecia longiforceps).
    • The bugs, officially called Plecia longiforceps, earned their nickname from their distinctive mating behaviour, flying attached as couples during copulation. […] Originally from subtropical regions of south-eastern China, Taiwan and Japan’s Ryukyu islands, the lovebugs were first scientifically...2025 June 30, Raphael Rashid, “Seoul wrestles with how to handle invasion of ‘lovebugs’”, in The Guardian, →ISSN
  3. (informal) A person who is in love; a sweetheart.
    • His parents flipped their lids when the two lovebugs got hitched. Jonnie couldn't stand the fact that her beautiful young son, gone so long over seas, had now tangled up with an older woman, and even worse, an older divorced woman […]2009, Dee Kassabian, My Four Fathers and Other Short Stories, page 45

Synonyms of lovebug

Forms of lovebug

plurallovebugs

Origin of lovebug

From love + bug. From their mating behavior, remaining paired up for several days during copulation.

Questions about lovebug

What does lovebug mean?
Lovebug means an insect, the honeymoon fly (Plecia nearctica, family Biblionidae), native to Central America and the southeastern United States.
What part of speech is lovebug?
Lovebug is a noun.
What is the plural of lovebug?
The plural of lovebug is lovebugs.

Words near lovebug in the dictionary

  1. lovebombs
  2. lovebot
  3. lovebots
  4. lovebud
  5. lovebuds
  6. lovebug
  7. lovebugs
  8. Lovech
  9. lovechild
  10. lovechildren
  11. Lovecraft

Source and license

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