wasps
- 1Plural of wasp.
A swarm of wasps drove the hikers off the trail.
Gardeners often welcome wasps because they prey on caterpillars and aphids.
Note
A regular plural whose ending is a hiss rather than a buzz. After the voiceless p, the -s is a plain /s/, not the /z/ heard in bees. The lowercase spelling also stands for the US acronym WASP, so wasps can mean White Anglo-Saxon Protestants as well as the insects. Writing the capitalized WASPs keeps the two apart.
wasps is a form of wasp
wasp, noun: A winged insect with a narrow waist and usually a sting, especially the familiar black-and-yellow kind that builds paper nests; more broadly, any related insect that is not a bee or an ant. Full entry
- Forms
- waspwasps plural, plural
- Spelling
- wasp → wasps: add -s
- Sound
- The ending sounds like /s/.
Use it in a sentence
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