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polyphagous

polyphagous adjective: eating many types of food.

polyphagous: eating many types of food
Image: Ken Walker (Available online: PaDIL -, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Adjective

polyphagous (not comparable)

  1. Eating many types of food.
    • Animals show various degrees of adaptation aimed at taking advantage of available resources, but. . . most can be considered either specialists or generalists. Among plant-eating insects the more specific terms polyphagous, oligophagous, and monophagous are widely employed in relation to the...Timothy Johns: The Origins of Human Diet and Medicine -- CHEMICAL ECOLOGY. →ISBN, p. 5
  2. Feeding on many different species of host plants.
    • 2024 WA Government Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development: Agriculture and Food
      Polyphagous shot-hole borer Euwallacea fornicatus is a beetle native to Southeast Asia. The beetle attacks a wide range of plants by tunnelling into trunks, stems and branches.
      Polyphagous shot-hole...

Origin of polyphagous

From poly- + -phagous.

Questions about polyphagous

What does polyphagous mean?
Polyphagous means eating many types of food.
What part of speech is polyphagous?
Polyphagous is an adjective.

Words near polyphagous in the dictionary

  1. polyphagid
  2. polyphagids
  3. polyphagism
  4. polyphagist
  5. polyphagists
  6. polyphagous
  7. polyphagy
  8. polyphalange
  9. polyphalangism
  10. polyphalangy
  11. polyphallic

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: polyphagous (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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