Word.ws English Dictionary

woodlice

woodlice is the plural 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

Phrases with woodlice

Questions about woodlice

What is woodlice the plural of?
Woodlice is the plural of woodlouse.

Words near woodlice in the dictionary

  1. woodlessness
  2. woodlet
  3. woodlets
  4. Woodley
  5. Woodleys
  6. woodlice
  7. Woodlief
  8. Woodliefs
  9. woodlike
  10. woodline
  11. woodlines

Source and license

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