Spheges

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A solitary digger wasp of the genus Sphex that stocks its nest burrows with paralyzed insects as food for its young
2. Any of several solitary wasps in the genus Sphex, which dig burrows and provision them with captured prey for their larvae
3. Digger wasps belonging to the genus Sphex, known for hunting insects and storing them in underground nests for their offspring

Etymology: "Spheges" is the plural of "sphex", a name for a genus of digger wasps. The singular comes from Ancient Greek "sphēx", meaning "wasp", and the plural form in Greek was "sphēkes". The English plural most likely came in through Latin, which borrowed the Greek name as "Sphēgēs". The Greek noun is the ancestor of the modern scientific name. Naturalists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reached back to Greek to label the insects they catalogued, so "Sphex" is a classical root given a new job, not a term that Greek naturalists used for these particular wasps. The plural spheges therefore carries the Greek word through two languages before it reaches English biology.