Word.ws English Dictionary

spermatophylax

spermatophylax noun: a nutritive bolus ejected by some male insects during copulation.

Noun

spermatophylax (plural spermatophylaxes)

  1. A nutritive bolus ejected by some male insects during copulation
    • Male decorated crickets Gryllodes sigillatus transfer a spermatophore to the female during copulation that is composed of an edible gift, the spermatophylax, and the ampulla that contains the ejaculate.2015 October 7, “What’s in the Gift? Towards a Molecular Dissection of Nuptial Feeding in a Cricket”, in PLOS ONE, →DOI

Forms of spermatophylax

pluralspermatophylaxes

Origin of spermatophylax

From spermato- + phylax.

Questions about spermatophylax

What does spermatophylax mean?
Spermatophylax means a nutritive bolus ejected by some male insects during copulation.
What part of speech is spermatophylax?
Spermatophylax is a noun.
What is the plural of spermatophylax?
The plural of spermatophylax is spermatophylaxes.

Words near spermatophylax in the dictionary

  1. spermatophoral
  2. spermatophore
  3. spermatophores
  4. spermatophoric
  5. spermatophorous
  6. spermatophylax
  7. spermatophylaxes
  8. spermatophyte
  9. spermatophytes
  10. spermatophytic
  11. spermatoproteasome

Source and license

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