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gnat
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
gnat
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ And, little by little, the utterly unprecedented thought began buzzing around my cortex, like a gnat in a jar.
▪ As was suggested in argument, that would indeed be to swallow the elephant and strain at the gnat.
▪ In five hours she'd be marking Miguel O'Brien - a gnat trying to curb an elephant.
▪ Milk, sticky and sour on her dress, attracted every small flying thing from gnats to grasshoppers.
▪ The heat and the gnats were the next burden.
▪ The last two weeks had been damp and little gnats thickened the air like a living dust.
▪ Vanessa could shoot the eye out of a gnat at fifty paces.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Gnat

Gnat \Gnat\, n. [AS. gn[ae]t.]

  1. (Zo["o]l.) A blood-sucking dipterous fly, of the genus Culex, undergoing a metamorphosis in water. The females have a proboscis armed with needlelike organs for penetrating the skin of animals. These are wanting in the males. In America they are generally called mosquitoes. See Mosquito.

  2. Any fly resembling a Culex in form or habits; esp., in America, a small biting fly of the genus Simulium and allies, as the buffalo gnat, the black fly, etc.

    Gnat catcher (Zo["o]l.), one of several species of small American singing birds, of the genus Polioptila, allied to the kinglets.

    Gnat flower, the bee flower.

    Gnat hawk (Zo["o]l.), the European goatsucker; -- called also gnat owl.

    Gnat snapper (Zo["o]l.), a bird that catches gnats.

    Gnat strainer, a person ostentatiously punctilious about trifles. Cf.
    --Matt. xxiii. 24.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
gnat

Old English gnætt "gnat, midge, mosquito," earlier gneat, used of various small, flying insects, from Proto-Germanic *gnattaz (cognates: Low German gnatte, German Gnitze); perhaps literally "biting insect" and related to gnaw.\n\nThe gnatte is a litil fflye, and hatte culex..he soukeþ blood and haþ in his mouþ a pipe, as hit were a pricke..And is a-countid a-mong volatiles..and greueþ slepinge men wiþ noyse & wiþ bytinge and wakeþ hem of here reste.

[John of Trevisa, transl. of Bartholomew de Glanville's "De proprietatibus rerum," 1398]

\n
Wiktionary
gnat

n. Any small insect of the order ''Diptera'', specifically within the suborder ''Nematocera''.

WordNet
gnat
  1. n. any of various small biting flies: midges; biting midges; black flies; sand flies

  2. British usage

Wikipedia
Gnat

A gnat is any of many species of tiny flying insects in the Dipterid suborder Nematocera, especially those in the families Mycetophilidae, Anisopodidae and Sciaridae.

Gnat (disambiguation)

Gnat or GNAT may refer to:

  • gnat, a colloquial name to any of various small insects
  • GNAT, a Free Software compiler for the Ada programming language
  • Ghana National Association of Teachers, Ghana National Association of Teachers
  • Grand National Assembly of Turkey, Grand National Assembly of Turkey
  • GNAT (torpedo) (German Naval Acoustic Torpedo), the Allied term for the German G7es homing torpedo
  • Folland Gnat, a light jet fighter/trainer aircraft
  • GNAT-750, an unmanned aerial vehicle

Usage examples of "gnat".

Ford Prefect brought it careering down among the gantries and landing lights at Han Dold spaceport, where it settled like a gigantic, startled and very noisy gnat.

In the evenings, when mist enveloped the huge construction project, the builders would withdraw into their barracks, close the windows and light smoky fires of damp twigs outside the doors to drive away the swarms of mosquitoes and gnats which filled the air with a sinister, high-pitched buzzing.

Lean, pallid students have found themselves plump and blooming, and it has happened that one whose hair was straight as gnat of an Indian has been startled to behold himself in his mirror with a fringe of hyacinthine curls about his rejuvenated countenance.

Sarka Kaul led them over desolate trails until they reached the shadowed forests, where winged lizards fluttered about, hunting for moths and gnats in the canopy.

Every Underground BBS is surrounded by a gnat cloud of wannabes who spend their lives trying to squirrel together enough hacker kudos to be included on the board, and they rarely succeed.

The cows were moiling and bawling and the dust rose in the cold air and hung above the corrals and chutes like brown clouds of gnats swimming in schools above the cold ground.

It felt almost as if they were gnats inside a giant old-fashioned computer box, with the floor a great motherboard covered with winding lines and square-chunked chips.

After thy text nor after thy rubrich I will not work as muchel as a gnat.

She was standing in front of a pointillist rendition of a human head formed by a cloud of gengineered gnats.

The calypter is small and inconspicuous and the mesonotal suture incomplete, which is common in eye gnats, pomace or vinegar flies, but the wings are silent in flight.

The Ulk Bog went right at the monster, a bothersome gnat waiting to be crushed.

The only support for my intel- lect was my deep-seated certainty that one of the effects of the psychotropic smoking mixture was to induce me to hallucinate the size of the gnat.

In the grasses, in the trees, deep in the calix of punka flower and magnolia bloom, the gnats, the caterpillars, the beetles, all the microscopic, multitudinous life of the daytime drowsed and dozed.

As I approached, the ground grew quaggy beneath my shoes and a swarm of gnats flew into my face and hovered.

Turning farther starward, she winced at the idiot din from the planet of the gnats.