botfly
noun
botfly is a noun meaning “One of several dipterous insects of the family Oestridae, the larvae of which are parasites on many animals, including humans” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled B-O-T-F-L-Y and has 2 syllables, and it appears about once in every 43 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of botfly is botflies.
What does botfly mean?
noun
- 1
One of several dipterous insects of the family Oestridae, the larvae of which are parasites on many animals, including humans.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce botfly?
Botfly has 2 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vealhurl-botfly.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of botfly
- botflies plural
- bot fly
- bot-fly
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is botfly?
Botfly appears about once in every 43 million words in written English, the 201,693rd most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Botfly in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense insect:
| Language | Words |
|---|---|
| French | œstre |
| German | Dasselfliege, Biesfliege |
| Portuguese | mosca-varejeira, mosca-berneira |
| Spanish | éstrido |
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.
Where does botfly come from?
From bot + fly.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).