Word.ws English Dictionary

ovicides

ovicides is the plural of ovicide.

Meaning of ovicide

Noun (1)

ovicide (countable and uncountable, plural ovicides)

  1. (countable) Any substance designed to kill or destroy eggs or ova, especially those of insects, mites, or other pests or parasites.
  2. (uncountable) The killing or destroying of eggs or ova.
    • Should she [the mother of a granivorous insect larva] attempt to reduce the competition faced by her offspring by some form of ovicide?1985, R. H. Smith, C. M. Lessells, “Oviposition, ovicide and larval competition in granivorous insects”, in R. M. Sibly, R. H. Smith, editors, Behavioural Ecology: Ecological Consequences of Adaptive...

Noun (2)

ovicide (uncountable)

  1. (humorous, rare) The killing of sheep.
    • A novel kind of Ovicide.—Last week, in a Gentleman’s park in the Upper Ward of Lanarkshire, a sheep was found greatly mangled, supposed by a dog.1817 October 13, Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, […], volume XVIII, number 940, Portsmouth, Hampshire: G. H. Mottley and W. Harrison, →OCLC, page [2], column 3

Questions about ovicides

What is ovicides the plural of?
Ovicides is the plural of ovicide.

Words near ovicides in the dictionary

  1. ovicellate
  2. ovicells
  3. ovicellular
  4. ovicidal
  5. ovicide
  6. ovicides
  7. ovicular
  8. oviculture
  9. Ovid
  10. ovideposition
  11. ovidepositions

Source and license

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