A persistently annoying person

Usage examples of gadfly.

The Odynerus has for its instinctive mission to arrest the excessive multiplication of a lucerne weevil, no less than twenty-four of whose grubs are necessary to rear the offspring of the brigand, and nearly sixty gadflies are sacrificed to the growth of a single Bembex.

Meantime Eros passed unseen through the grey mist, causing confusion, as when against grazing heifers rises the gadfly, which oxherds call the breese.

Bob Packwood Is the Republican Gadfly Who Keeps Stinging the President.

In due succession there came "Where the GadFlies Cease from Troubling," "The Haven of the Herd," and "A-dream in Dairyland," studies of walnut trees and dun cows.

Hamid-Jones's father-in-law was grayer after the years of shepherding the dhimmi communities of four star systems to their new promised land, arranging transport and acting as Aziz's gadfly in getting a fleet of their own built in the Sultan's shipyards, but he was still a powerfully built, vigorous man who looked as if he would go on forever.

Besides which there stirred not the least breath of wind, and flies and gadflies did swarm in prodigious quantity, which, settling upon her excoriate flesh, stung her so shrewdly that 'twas as if she received so many stabs with a javelin, and she was ever restlessly feeling her sores with her hands, and cursing herself, her life, her lover, and the scholar.

Only this: that what with the heat of the sun above and the floor beneath her, and the scarification of her flesh in every part by the flies and gadflies, that flesh, which in the night had dispelled the gloom by its whiteness, was now become red as madder, and so besprent with clots of blood, that whoso had seen her would have deemed her the most hideous object in the world.

Big-time gamblers and top-dollar prostitutes rubbed shoulders (and other things) with Chicago's leading social gadflies, most of whom were looking for one last thrill on the way to senility or a first thrill on the road to adulthood.