Skip to main content
PlainSpell

formic

/ˈfɔː(ɹ)mɪk/adjective

formic is an adjective meaning “Of or pertaining to ants” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled F-O-R-M-I-C and has 2 syllables, and it appears about once in every 6 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data).

What does formic mean?

adjective

  1. 1

    Of or pertaining to ants.

  2. 2

    Of, pertaining to or derived from formic acid (or from methane).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce formic?

  • /ˈfɔː(ɹ)mɪk/

Formic 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-formic.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

How common is formic?

Formic appears about once in every 6 million words in written English, the 71,529th 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).

Formic in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense of formic acid:

LanguageWords
Frenchformique
Portuguesefórmico
Spanishfórmico

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 formic come from?

Formed from the root of Latin formīca (“ant”) + -ic.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).