Word.ws English Dictionary

wood louse

wood louse is the alternative form of woodlouse.

Meaning of woodlouse

Noun

woodlouse (plural woodlice)

  1. Any of various small terrestrial isopod crustaceans of suborder Oniscidea, having a rigid segmented exoskeleton, usually feeding on dead plant matter and living in damp, dark places, such as under stones or bark. Several common species roll into a ball when disturbed, hence names such as pill bug and roly-poly.
    • In addition, both the woodlouse and the crayfish possess an unpaired medial nerve which runs along the whole length of the ventral nerve cord, linking adjacent ganglia.1995, Olaf Breidbach, Wolfram Kutsch, editors, The Nervous Systems of Invertebrates: An Evolutionary and Comparative Approach, page 193
    Synonyms:
    armadillo bug, butcher boy, cheese-bug, cheesybug, cheeselog, chiggypig, chucky pig, doodlebug, grammersow, lobster lug

Forms of wood louse

pluralwood lice

Questions about wood louse

What is wood louse the alternative form of?
Wood louse is the alternative form of woodlouse.

Words near wood louse in the dictionary

  1. wood lemmings
  2. wood lice
  3. wood lily
  4. wood lot
  5. wood lots
  6. wood louse
  7. wood mice
  8. wood millet
  9. wood mint
  10. wood mints
  11. wood mouse

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wood louse (page history and authors); woodlouse (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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