Word.ws English Dictionary

ootheca

/əʊəˈθiːkə/

ootheca noun: an egg case of any of the orthopteroid insects (such as cockroaches and mantids).

ootheca: an egg case of any of the orthopteroid insects (such as cockroaches and mantids)
Image: Toby Hudson, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

ootheca (plural oothecae)

  1. An egg case of any of the orthopteroid insects (such as cockroaches and mantids).
    • Since the founding of the colony it had been a tradition to unload oothecae – egg sacs – in the cabinets so the younglings would be near the principal food stocks.1994, Daniel Evan Weiss, The Roaches Have No King, →ISBN, page 4
  2. The theca or sporangium of ferns.

Forms of ootheca

pluraloothecae
alternative formoötheca

Origin of ootheca

From oo- (“egg-”) + theca (“sheath”).

Words formed from ootheca

Questions about ootheca

What does ootheca mean?
Ootheca means an egg case of any of the orthopteroid insects (such as cockroaches and mantids).
What part of speech is ootheca?
Ootheca is a noun.
How do you pronounce ootheca?
Ootheca is pronounced /əʊəˈθiːkə/.
What is the plural of ootheca?
The plural of ootheca is oothecae.

Words near ootheca in the dictionary

  1. OOTD
  2. OOTDs
  3. Ooten
  4. Ootens
  5. Ootha
  6. ootheca
  7. oothecae
  8. oothecal
  9. ootid
  10. ootidogenesis
  11. ootids

Source and license

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