Word.ws English Dictionary

mayflies

mayflies is the plural of mayfly.

Meaning of mayfly

Noun

mayfly (plural mayflies or mayfly)

  1. Any of the many fragile insects of the order Ephemeroptera that develop in fresh water and live very briefly as winged adults.
    • While some animals take months to reproduce, mayfly need just one perfect day.
  2. (attributive, figuratively) Characterized by a short duration; short-lived.
    • Dipping a French fry in her tomato ketchup, she admits that her name recognition could be higher. But it did spike a year ago during the mayfly premiership of Liz Truss.2023 October 7, Jim Pickard, “It’s not government that creates jobs”, in FT Weekend (Life & Arts section), London: The Financial Times Ltd., →ISSN, →OCLC, page 3

Questions about mayflies

What is mayflies the plural of?
Mayflies is the plural of mayfly.

Words near mayflies in the dictionary

  1. Mayfield East
  2. Mayfield North
  3. Mayfield West
  4. mayfish
  5. mayfishes
  6. mayflies
  7. mayflower
  8. Mayflower Village
  9. mayflowers
  10. mayfly
  11. Mayford

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mayflies (page history and authors); mayfly (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:

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