Acaricides

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A class of chemical substances designed to kill ticks and mites on plants or livestock
2. Products formulated for agricultural use to protect crops from harmful arachnids
3. Agents employed in veterinary medicine to manage infestations of harmful arachnids on animals

Etymology: Acaricides are named for the mites and ticks they kill. The first part comes from "acarid," a term for the mite family Acaridae, which itself traces back to a Greek word for a tiny mite or tick, "akari." The second part, "-cide," is a suffix meaning "killer," taken from the Latin verb "caedere," meaning "to cut down" or "to kill." English borrowed "-cide" from Latin, and it reached English through Middle French, which had already formed words such as "homicide" and "insecticide." The result is a deliberately constructed technical term rather than an old everyday word. Its pattern is the same as "insecticide," "herbicide," and "fungicide," all built by attaching "-cide" to the name of a pest or organism. Because chemists and agricultural scientists needed a precise label for substances targeting mites specifically, they combined the mite-group name with this familiar suffix, giving the category a clear, self-explanatory name.

Synonyms: pesticides, insecticides, mite killers, killers, herbicides