blackfly

Other forms of blackfly

plural

blackflies·

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 blackfly

What does blackfly mean?

blackfly means "blackish aphid that infests e.g. beans and sugar beets". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in blackfly?

blackfly has 2 syllables: black-fly. The stress falls on "black".

What is another word for blackfly?

Close synonyms include bean aphid, Aphis fabae, black fly, buffalo gnat. 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 blackfly a common word?

blackfly is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.