drosophila

1. 1.

   small fruit fly used by Thomas Hunt Morgan in studying basic mechanisms of inheritance

   SynonymsDrosophila melanogaster

   Broaderfruit fly

   Part ofgenus Drosophila

Other forms of drosophila

plural

drosophilae

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 drosophila

What does drosophila mean?

drosophila means "small fruit fly used by Thomas Hunt Morgan in studying basic mechanisms of inheritance".

How many syllables are in drosophila?

drosophila has 4 syllables: dro-so-phi-la. The stress falls on "so".

What is another word for drosophila?

Close synonyms include Drosophila melanogaster. 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 drosophila a common word?

drosophila 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.