Herbivory

//həˈbɪvəɹi// noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The consumption of living plant tissue by animals. uncountable

    "Herbivory is a paradoxical interspecific interaction. On the one hand, upward of a quarter of all species are herbivorous insects (Strong et al., 1984) and some additional fraction of the noninsect species is also herbivorous, so plant-herbivore interactions are common. On the other hand, the simple observation is that, to a first approximation, the earth is green (Hairston et al., 1960), despite the combined effect of those herbivores."

Synonyms

All synonyms
phytophagy

Example

More examples

"Herbivory is a paradoxical interspecific interaction. On the one hand, upward of a quarter of all species are herbivorous insects (Strong et al., 1984) and some additional fraction of the noninsect species is also herbivorous, so plant-herbivore interactions are common. On the other hand, the simple observation is that, to a first approximation, the earth is green (Hairston et al., 1960), despite the combined effect of those herbivores."

Etymology

From herbivore + -y.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.