beetle

1. 1.

   insect having biting mouthparts and front wings modified to form horny covers overlying the membranous rear wings

   Broaderinsect

   Narrowertiger beetleladybugground beetlefireflylong-horned beetleleaf beetlecarpet beetleclerid beetlelamellicorn beetleelaterid beetle

   Part ofColeoptera
2. 2.

   a tool resembling a hammer but with a large head (usually wooden); used to drive wedges or ram down paving stones or for crushing or beating or flattening or smoothing

   Synonymsmallet

   Broaderhammer

   Narrowercarpenter's malletgavel

1. 1.

   jutting or overhanging

   “beetle brows”

   Synonymsbeetling

   Similarprotrusive

Other forms of beetle

plural

beetles·

past tense

beetled·

present participle

beetling·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about beetle

What does beetle mean?

beetle means "be suspended over or hang over". That is the primary sense; the word has 6 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in beetle?

beetle has 2 syllables: bee-tle. The stress falls on "bee". In IPA it is /ˈbitəl/.

What is another word for beetle?

Close synonyms include overhang, mallet, beetling. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is beetle a common word?

beetle is banded "Familiar" — widely understood, used when the subject calls for it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.