sphexish

Syllables: sphex·ish/ˈsfɛksɪʃ/

sphexish adjective: of animal behaviour: deterministic, preprogrammed.

Image: Bob Peterson from North Palm Beach, Florida, Planet Earth!, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Adjective

sphexish (comparative more sphexish, superlative most sphexish)

Of animal behaviour: deterministic, preprogrammed.
- Is this the top of the pinnacle then? Or is it just the top of our pinnacle, the point at which we reveal our sphexish streak and flounder about foolishly in the face of higher thought?1984, Daniel C[lement] Dennett, “Making Reason Practical”, in Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (A Bradford Book), Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, published 1997, →ISBN, page 46
- [A] sphexish creature in unusual circumstances may seem to be under the control of a malevolent puppet-master. A reliable sign that behaviour is sphexish is that the creature persists with it in circumstances that render it futile, rather as my first electronic typewriter would go on furiously...1999, John [William Nevill] Watkins, “Genes, Brains, and Creativity”, in Human Freedom after Darwin: A Critical Rationalist View, Chicago; LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court Publishing Company, →ISBN, part 1...
Antonyms:

antisphexish

Examples of sphexish in a sentence

[A] sphexish creature in unusual circumstances may seem to be under the control of a malevolent puppet-master.1999, John [William Nevill] Watkins, “Genes, Brains, and Creativity”, in Human Freedom after Darwin: A Critical Rationalist View, Chicago...
Dual-process models of cognition […] all propose, in one way or another, that in fact we all are a little bit sphexish.2004, Keith E. Stanovich, “A Brain at War with Itself”, in The Robot’s Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin, Chicago, Ill....
Maybe it is hard to say exactly why we're not sphexish, but surely we're not.2013, Stephen D. Hales, “Freedom”, in This is Philosophy: An Introduction, Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, →ISBN, paragraph 4.23...

Antonyms of sphexish

antisphexish

Forms of sphexish

comparative	more sphexish
superlative	most sphexish

Origin of sphexish

From sphex (“sand wasp of Sphex or an allied genus”) + -ish (suffix meaning ‘being like, similar to, typical of’), coined by the American scientist and scholar of comparative literature Douglas Hofstadter (born 1945) in a September 1982 “Metamagical Themas” column in Scientific American, after a study of the behaviour of sphexide wasps. Sphex is derived from Ancient Greek σφήξ (sphḗx, “wasp”), either from Proto-Indo-European *bʰey- (“bee”) or a Pre-Greek word.

Words formed from sphexish

Questions about sphexish

What does sphexish mean?: Sphexish means of animal behaviour: deterministic, preprogrammed.
How do you use sphexish in a sentence?: [A] sphexish creature in unusual circumstances may seem to be under the control of a malevolent puppet-master.
What part of speech is sphexish?: Sphexish is an adjective.
How do you pronounce sphexish?: Sphexish is pronounced /ˈsfɛksɪʃ/ (UK).

Words near sphexish in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: sphexish (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: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-I learned some phrases-sphexish.wav.

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