water flea

Questions about water flea

What does water flea mean?

water flea means "minute free-swimming freshwater copepod having a large median eye and pear-shaped body and long antennae used in swimming; important in some food chains and as intermediate hosts of parasitic worms that affect man e.g. Guinea worms". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

What is another word for water flea?

Close synonyms include cyclops, daphnia. 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 water flea a common word?

water flea is banded "Uncommon" — turns up in careful writing rather than conversation. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.